Watching the Watchers
by LM
Summary: Chapter Sixteen up! The Question has time for a moment of introspection and doesn't like what he finds . . .
1. Prologue: Now and Forever

_Disclaimer:_

All characters are property of DC Comics and are used her for entertainment, not for profit. 

I guess you could call this story mildly Elseworlds-ish since it's basically the "regular" DC universe, except with a few character and plot changes. Nothing as dramatic as "Superman turns to crime" or anything, but if you notice little inconsistencies between this and the comic book DCU, that's why. I do TRY to stick with the mainstream DCU as much as possible, though. ^_^

This story takes place during the Obsidian Age storyline which took place in summer 2002 in _JLA._ But if you haven't read it, don't worry; you don't have to have. ^_^

  


* * *

  


  
_**WATCHING THE WATCHERS**_

  


* * *

  
_**Prologue**_

  


* * *

Superman was dead. 

This wasn't unusual, of course. Superman was dead, or presumed dead, quite often. The first funeral had been a novelty and quite touching in its own way, but every subsequent disappearance had been greeted with less fanfare, to the point where the _Daily Planet_ now listed Superman's obituary, when it was required, in the regular "Births and Deaths" section rather than on the front page. 

This time there was a difference, though. It wasn't _just_ Superman who was deceased, but the entire JLA. Batman. Wonder Woman. The Flash. Green Lantern. The Martian Manhunter. Even _Plastic Man,_ who wasn't nearly as given to dramatic disappearances and reinstatements as the others, was gone. And like the rest, he had been missing for months. 

Shortly before the huge, confusing Crisis that no one could quite remember right, someone in the cape-and-cowl set had coined a saying. (Guy Gardner later claimed credit, but no one believed him.) Originally a not-so-subtle snipe at the then Detroit-based Justice League, people had eventually stopped smirking when they said it, to the point where it was now recited as solemnly as any eulogy: 

"The JLA is dead; long live the JLA." 

The world needed the Justice League too much to ever let it die. And indeed, the League had regenerated after each seemingly mortal blow. Members died and members left and new heroes rose to the challenge, inspired by the past and looking toward the future. 

But this time there was a difference in the roster rollover. _This_ time the previous JLA, the Big Seven (or the Big Six plus Plastic Man, if you wanted to be nasty) had had a member who, in the manner of a true cynic, had prepared for the worst. Someone who believed in planning ahead. In _protocols._

Batman had quietly, coldly chosen a League to serve him posthumously. It had brains (the Atom and Nightwing.) It had brawn (Firestorm and Faith). It had precision (Green Arrow and Major Disaster). It had, for the first time since Zauriel's departure, mystical support (Jason Blood.) And it had Hawkgirl too, although it was anyone's guess exactly how she fit in. The Bat's reasons were his alone.

One thing was clear. They had not been chosen by the Big Seven; they had been chosen by _Batman._ Batman, being a student of human nature, had probably realized that this fact in and of itself would cause problems. Batman, being Batman, probably hadn't cared. 

But in the restaurant known as Warriors, a colorful group displaying various degrees of sobriety cared very much . . . 


	2. Chapter 1: In With the New

  


_**Chapter One**_

* * *

If, five years ago, someone had claimed that Guy Gardner--_Guy,_ whose nickname as a Green Lantern was "Rambo with a ring"--would open a successful and lucrative themed restaurant, he would've been greeted with wild, possibly hysterical, laughter. But then no one back then would have believed that Hal Jordan would go crazy, either. Or that Lex Luthor would become president. Things changed, and so did people, and Guy was a prime example. He still liked to play the abrasive tough guy, but his hairtrigger temper had been muted with age, not to mention repeated blows to the head. "Guy is like a Magic Eight Ball," Booster Gold once commented. "Just keep shaking him until you get something you like." 

After years of sulking in the shadow of his contemporary Hal Jordan, Guy had ultimately done what Hal, fearless Hal, pride of the Green Lantern Corps, could never do. He had _moved on._

So Guy Gardner, no longer a Green Lantern (although still, by anyone's estimation, a Warrior), had settled down, sort of; content to only occasionally kick bad guy butt, he had opened a themed restaurant and bar intended to appeal to a very select demographic indeed. _Superheroes._

It shouldn't have worked, but it did. Everyone from Steel to the Flash, and even sometimes Superman, dropped in at Warriors for the occasional drink or dinner and the restaurant flourished. Most days you could find superheroes dressed in every hue chatting over their drinks as they casually kept one eye on the current football, baseball, or basketball game. 

Today was most definitely not "most days." 

Everyone was crowded around the televisions in tight huddles, occasionally elbowing each other in their attempts to get a clear view of the screens. Uneasy currents, unhappy whispers filtered through the mob. 

Of course, some people didn't bother whispering. 

"'S not right!" a young man dressed in red loudly announced from behind a full gold mask, swaying over his drink. "'S . . . 'S . . . 'S jus' NOT!" 

"Shut up, Anarky." 

"Damn anti-heroes . . . don't know why you let him in here in the first place, Guy . . ." 

"I think you should ban anyone who can't even spell his own name." 

"Will you all just SHUT UP?" Guy snapped, grabbing a remote and cranking up the volume till the TVs were blaring their message. 

"--the 'new' Justice League of America," the attractive newswoman announced against the backdrop of the United Nations headquarters in New York. "This, of course, following the mysterious disappearance of the former JLA members several months ago. The Atom, aka Ray Palmer, appears to be the spokesman of the reformed Justice League--" 

"HA!" Anarky said, slopping beer over his red costume. "What we don't s-s-shee is Batman's little . . . his little PRO-TEG-SHAY--" he stabbed wildly at the pronunciation, "--Nigh'wing, hiding in the . . . SH-SH-SHADOWS!" He put down his drink and dabbed clumsily at his sleeve with a napkin. 

"Shut up, Anarky" Guy repeated. "No more drinks, either. You _are_ twenty-one, _right?"_ he added suspiciously, eyeing Anarky's gold mask. 

"Age limits . . . Jus' another way the gover'ment makes us dance like puppets on shtrings," the vigilante muttered. He reached for his drink, only to find that it had been absconded by Booster Gold while he was distracted. The self-proclaimed Corporate Crusader smiled widely under the anarchist's glare as the newswoman continued. 

"--addition to Professor Palmer, whose powers focus on self-miniaturization, the team now includes Firestorm, the original Green Arrow, Hawkgirl (a former Justice Society member)--" 

Hawkman muttered something unhappy from a corner of the bar. 

"--a new player called 'Faith', the reknowned historian Jason Blood--" 

_"Jason Blood?_ The _demon guy?"_ Donna Troy said incredulously. 

"--and, in a surprising turn of events, Major Disaster, a former member of the _In_justice League--" 

Loud exclamations of protest, surprise, and in many cases horror drowned out the television as the crowd reacted to the news that a _known criminal_ was now a member of the superhero A-list known as the Justice League. Superboy, who had managed to sneak into the bar when everyone was distracted, now lost his temper completely, giving a disbelieving bellow of _"MAJOR DISASTER??"_ as he threw a nearby shot glass at the screen in a display of super-immaturity. 

Wildcat howled in protest at the loss of his shot glass, but no one heard him over the near-supersonic shriek from Black Canary as the contents of the glass doused her. She turned, gave Wildcat a wrathful glare, and aimed a high-flung kick at him. In an unfortunate conflict of timing, Green Arrow--the _second_ Green Arrow, Connor Hawke--happened to lean in front of Wildcat just then in an attempt to pay for his lemonade. (Connor didn't drink.) Black Canary's kick connected, knocking the second generation archer into about five other heroes. Tempers snapped and blows began to fall. Guy shouted for everyone to calm down, but no one was listening. Black Canary at least had the grace to look abashed as the melee exploded into a metahuman version of a barroom brawl. 

Blue Beetle and Booster Gold managed to duck out of the fighting fairly quickly and back away to an unoccupied part of the bar. They watched the combatants for a few minutes, quietly making bets, before Beetle edged close enough to them to grab the remote off the floor. He increased the volume to maximum and when the TV _still_ wasn't audible over the clamor, he gave up and switched to closed captioning. 

Booster, meanwhile, was helping himself to any full glasses that had been conveniently forgotten on the bar. He pushed Anarky's glass aside with deliberation, however. "I only took it to piss him off," he explained to Blue Beetle. "I'm not risking any antiauthoritarian cooties." 

Anarky himself was sitting with his head cradled in his hands, oblivious to the cacophony around him. "It'sh not right . . . They're 'n their clubhoushe on th' . . . th' moon . . . shtarin' down," he slurred softly. 

No one heard him. 

But in a dark corner of Warriors, shadowed by the dimly lit cases displaying the paraphernalia of dead Green Lanterns, the solitary figure peering out from his huddle of trenchcoat might have agreed. 

  


  



	3. Chapter 2: Designated Driving

  


_**Chapter Two**_

* * *

By the time Guy, with assistance from Sentinel, dragged the last of the combatants apart, the hour was late and the newscast was over. Dispirited and in some cases nursing bruises, the heroes began to straggle out. Poor Connor, who had had a particularly bad time of it, winced as he limped away. Wildcat, on the other hand, grinned even as his left eye puffed up swollen and purple. 

"It ain't a good night if you don't go home with a little present to remember it by," he explained. 

Blue and Gold were the last to leave, with Booster looking more than a little tipsy as Beetle steered him towards the door. 

"You aren't lettin' him drive like that, are you?" Guy asked as Blue Beetle paused to pay his tab. 

"He didn't drive, he flew," Beetle replied in a distracted voice as he tried to simultaneously fish his wallet out of his belt and prop Booster up against the bar. 

"Yesh," Booster said, smiling as he swayed gently from side to side. "I fleeeew heeere wi' my . . . my . . ." He stared at his right hand with a vague look of surprise. 

"With his flight ring," Beetle finished for him. "Which I took away after his fifth drink. Guy, do you still take checks?" 

"That depends; do your checks still bounce?" Guy asked. "I don't remember Gold buyin' that many drinks." 

"He didn't _buy_ that many; he start draining abandoned glasses during the fight," Beetle explained. "Kept saying 'Waste not, want not' . . . So that's a big 'no' on the checks, is it?" 

"Overconshumption ish the capitalisht way," Booster slurred happily. His brow furrowed as he tilted his head, apparently deep in thought. "I wanna egg Anarky's car." 

"I don't think he _has_ a car. And even if he does--no. Guy? Checks?" 

"Okay, okay," Guy grumbled. "But your bank account had better be able to back it up this time." 

"Like the funny man on TV says--I guarantee it!" Blue Beetle flipped open his checkbook and dashed out a check, scrawling his name--his real name, Ted Kord--across the bottom of it. Most patrons paid in cash to protect their secret identities, but Guy already knew Blue Beetle's alter ego from their days together in Justice League International. "See you around, Guy." 

"Not if I see you first," Guy said, then grinned. "Keep Gold out of trouble." 

"Damn it, Jim! I'm a vigilante, not a miracle worker!" Beetle called over his shoulder as he tried to prevent Booster from walking into a wall. 

The night air had a refreshing bite to it, a smell of rain. Blue Beetle hummed to himself as he electronically called down the insectoid airship that mimicked his name. Moonlight flashed on the steel-blue Bug as it broke the cloud cover and soared down, pausing to hover directly over the street in near silence. 

"C'mon Booster, ride's here," Beetle said, shaking Booster, who had been left slumped against a parked car while Beetle summoned the Bug with the controls built into his gloves. 

"Uhhhnn . . . ?" Booster Gold replied eloquently. Blue Beetle only had to repeat himself three more times before Booster actually managed to stagger into the Bug. 

Beetle was about to direct Booster to one of the seats in front of the viewports when it occurred to him that he might not want an inebriated superhero so close to the controls.He sat Booster down in one of the back seats instead, then sighed in exasperation when his friend promptly toppled over onto the floor. Beetle regarded him for a minute before shrugging and moving to the front to take the pilot's chair; despite being sprawled across the floor, Booster seemed comfortable enough (or at least pleasantly oblivious) and besides, the floor would be easier to clean in case he threw up. 

"I get enough of _that_ when he's sober." Beetle punched the coordinates for Booster's penthouse into the Bug's navigational system. "And he has the nerve to claim it's motion sickness . . . as if the _Bug_ would ever give a bumpy ride like some third-rate junker. Don't worry, baby," he patted the control panel. "He's just jealous that you're more stylish than his smelly ol' Boostermobile." 

Vague sounds of protest drifted up from the floor regarding the Boostermobile's alleged odor. 

"Yeah, yeah . . . tell it to your investors, Boost." Blue Beetle leaned back in his chair, crossed his feet on the dashboard, and watched the clouds curling around the viewports as the Bug glided towards its destination. 

The Bug was not only noiseless, but also swift; it soon reached the glittering highrise that served both as Booster's home and the headquarters for his company, Goldstar Incorporated. Blue Beetle gazed out the viewports, watching the Bug's reflection slide past in the mirrored windows as the airship circled the building. He parked the Bug on roof, beside the swimming pool. 

"Booster? We're here." Blue Beetle glanced over his shoulder, only to find that Booster was either asleep or unconscious--a case could be made for either state. "Honestly," Beetle sighed, "I don't know why I bother." He carried Booster over to a swank rooftop elevator that was worth more than some small companies, tapped in the access code ("Michael Jon Carter"), and rode down a floor to the penthouse, which took up the entire top floor of the building. 

Blue Beetle managed to trip over three pieces of furniture before he found the lightswitch. " . . . superhero from the future who doesn't even have voice-activated lights . . ." he muttered under his breath, straightening a rug that had been skewed when he'd tripped over an art nouveau footstool. To Booster's credit, he had shown remarkable restraint in decorating his home, namely by hiring professionals to do the job rather than attempting it himself. 

As the lights flared on, Booster twitched to life, shielding his eyes with a yellow-clad arm. "Nnnnngh . . . Too bri-iiight!" 

"Oh sure, now you wake up . . . _after_ I had to drag you across the roof," admonished Blue Beetle. 

"Bri-iiight . . ." Booster repeated. "Thanksh f'r the lift . . ." He pushed himself unsteadily to his feet. "Think 'm gonna . . . go t'bed." He miscalculated his path to the bedroom, tripped over the very footstool that had ambushed Beetle, stumbled a few feet, and landed on the couch. "Good 'nough," Booster sighed, squinching his eyes shut. 

Beetle shook his head in bemusement as he flipped off the lights and made his way to the elevator (this time being careful to avoid the furniture.) "Goodnight, Booster." 

"G'night . . ." 

Blue Beetle glanced around as he stepped out of the elevator and onto the roof. The cloud cover had grown dense and dark; large, wet raindrops slapped the rooftop walkways and dimpled the water in the swimming pool as a distant rumble sounded in the west. A summer storm was breaking. 

Blue Beetle made a dash for the Bug without getting _too_ wet. Once he was inside, he suddenly straightened with a thoughtful expression. He checked his utility belt; if he was right, the second pocket to the left still held . . . 

"Booster's flight ring." Beetle fished out the smooth gold ring with its mysterious"L" inscription. (Booster claimed it stood for "Legion", whatever _that_ meant.) "Well . . ." He hesitated as he glanced at the water streaming down the Bug's viewports, then slipped the ring back into his belt. 

"It's not like Booster will feel up to flying tomorrow anyway," he reasoned. "Hey, did I leave the radar on?" Beetle frowned down at the lightly illuminated green screen as it scanned in five-second intervals. He could've sworn he'd shut down all the Bug's systems before dragging Booster over to the elevator . . . but obviously he must have been mistaken. With a shrug, he booted up the Bug's navigation system and entered the coordinates for home. 

"Home", for the Bug, consisted of a converted Kord Inc. warehouse by the waterfront. It was actually parked in a chamber constructed _under_ the main building; since the Bug was a submersible as well as an airship, Beetle simply dove the machine into the water and brought it inside through the underwater airlock. Otherwise the neighbors might start getting suspicious; giant, bug-shaped vehicles weren't _that_ common, even in New York. 

As for Beetle himself, he had an apartment across the street. Obviously he couldn't go traipsing in and out as the Blue Beetle, so he'd selected an apartment on the ground floor and then built a tunnel from the warehouse to the apartment, being careful to avoid any underground pipes and cables. 

Soft yellow lights were strung through the brick-lined tunnel, but Blue Beetle could have found his way through in pitch blackness (and had even had to once or twice.) He took his time tonight, thinking about flight rings, the new JLA, and the fact that Booster now owed him twenty dollars. (Who in their right mind bet on Dr. Mid-Nite over Wildcat?) After a minute, he came to a sleek steel ladder set in the wall under a kind of electronic trapdoor. He tapped in the access code and it slid back with a soft hydraulic hiss. After Beetle climbed out, the trapdoor slid shut again, blending seamlessly with the floor. 

Blue Beetle's apartment was decent, but unimpressive . . . an average two-bedroom made to seem smaller due to the clutter of various electronics, tools, and bits of machinery strewn over any flat, otherwise unoccupied surface. His alter ego, Ted Kord, had always been an inventor anyway, so he didn't see any point in hiding his work, although anything overtly bug-shaped got stored in the always-locked second bedroom. 

Stifling a yawn, Blue Beetle pushed his way past the titanium shell of what would hopefully become a spy-drone for the Bug and made his way into the bedroom, where he changed into a bathrobe. Entering the adjoining bathroom, he began the ritual search for the toothpaste. Eventually his quest lead him out of the bathroom, through the living room, and into the kitchen, where he found the Colgate inexplicably wedged between the microwave and the wall. He was almost out of bread, he noted as he exited the kitchen, and began calculating when he could afford more. 

It wasn't that he was actually poor, per se; his income was decent--_more_ than decent. Generous, even. That was one reason he avoided sharing his address with anyone but his closest friends, as either Ted Kord or the Blue Beetle . . . He wasn't exactly _embarrassed_ by his home, but he had a hard time thinking up plausible excuses as to why the owner several successful businesses (Kord Inc. and its subsidiary, Kordtronics, not to mention Light Speed Entertainment, which he co-owned with Booster) would live in such a low income area. When necessary, Ted Kord explained to his business associates that the converted warehouse-turned-laboratory across the street was invaluable, while the Blue Beetle told his cape-and-cowl friends that the waterfront was the ideal place to store the Bug. 

The truth of the matter, Blue Beetle reflected as he leaned towards the mirror and vigorously scrubbed his teeth, was that being an inventor-vigilante was _expensive._ The Bug alone was a nightmare to finance and had a nasty habit of getting blown up. How many Bugs had he actually gone through, he wondered as he gargled. At _least_ three just while he was with the Justice League . . . probably more like five. And several since then. 

"How does Batman do it?" he wondered . . . then remembered that Batman _didn't_ do it, or anything else, anymore. Batman, like the rest of the JLA, was dead. 

Blue Beetle resumed his brushing with slow, thoughtful strokes. He had known Batman in Justice League International; hell, for a while Bats had _led_ the JLI. It was hard to accept that the pointy-eared taskmaster was gone. Somehow he had always assumed that when Death came for Batman, Bats would give Death that cold, level LOOK and keep working. Superman was easier to believe, of course; Superman was dead, missing, or in self-imposed exile half the time anyway . . . 

Blue Beetle spat, rinsed, and walked into the bedroom, absent-mindedly leaving the tube of toothpaste in an open drawer of his dresser. Odd to think of Superman and Batman dead at the same time . . . Would they end up in the same corner of the afterlife? They were both good men, for all Batman's dark demeanor, but it didn't seem like they should be able exist in the same place. He could picture Superman surrounded by clouds and angels, but Batman? Could Batman even _be_ happy without his crusade? 

"What happens to superheroes when they die?" he murmured sleepily as he flicked off the lights. 

"They corrode under the weight of filth and worms," a soft voice grated, "just like everyone else." 

There was perhaps half a second's pause before the lights flicked back on. 

A faceless figure sat in the chair in the corner, huddled in trenchcoat and shadow. "Hello, Blue Beetle. Guess who?"

  



	4. Chapter 3: Questionable Circumstances

  


_**Chapter Three**_

* * *

"Oh my God," Beetle breathed, staring at the man in the chair. The figure in the dripping trenchcoat had his hat pulled low, but that couldn't hide the fact that his face appeared completely smooth, both eyeless and mouthless. "_You._ What are you _doing_ here? How did you _get_ here? And how the _hell_ do you know my secret identity?" 

"Not every question has an answer, Blue Beetle. A joke," he added in his off-kilter voice. "Ha. Ha." 

"Ha ha," Beetle returned nervously. 

"Came here to find _you._ Your airship--not as secure as you think. Don't actually know your secret identity," he added. "Just know where you live." 

His reply hardly comforted Blue Beetle, whose hands twitched as he wished for his compressed air gun, a smoke bomb, or, hell, even a good solid _stick._ Anything that might give him an edge against the Question. 

It wasn't that his visitor was a supervillain or even a regular villain; in fact, the Question had once been the protector of Hub City, although he distained "those costumed types" and would fight anyone who called him a superhero. Semantics aside, he had played the vigilante game well enough; Blue Beetle had even teamed up with him once in his early days. 

But even then, there was an uneasy _difference_ that set the Question apart, and not just because he scorned primary colors and didn't wear a cape. Always an unstable force in a city that made Gotham look as dewy-eyed as Smallville, he was a faceless whirlwind of violence barely contained in a swirling trenchcoat. 

Whether he stayed because he wanted to save Hub City from itself or because it was a convenient excuse to fight was, no pun intended, questionable. But since he was fighting the good fight, no matter what his motives, the superhero community was content to ignore him. 

And then Coast City died, obliterated by a supervillain. And the Question's sanity died with it. 

Later, someone pieced together a possible connection. Just days before the tragedy, a dark-eyed young lady had moved to the coast. She had once been the mayor of Hub City, and it had taken her years to reluctantly admit that there was nothing she could do to stop the city from collapsing in on itself. After a lot of convincing from her friends--was the Question one of them? Did the Question _have_ friends?--she had decided to start anew in breezy Coast City, California, where the sun always shone and the ocean lapped at the city gates. 

She would have been unpacking her boxes when the attack vaporized Coast City. 

That knowledge came later, of course. At the time, all anyone knew was that an already dubious vigilante was now a raging, seething mass of violence. Criminals who came face to non-face with the Question no longer tried to surrender, because he kept coming at them whether their hands were in the air or not. Drug dealers began staying indoors at night after comparing notes on a figure who wandered up and down the streets with hunched shoulders, talking to himself and peering eyelessly into the shadows. Crooked cops took their doughnut breaks and returned to find their cars with the windows smashed and question marks scratched in the paintwork. And the Question stopped taking off his mask. 

Any other time, something would have been _done._ Metropolis-based or not, Superman took a global view of metahuman affairs and the Justice League was always prepared to intervene. 

But as it happened, the superhero community was otherwise occupied; Hal Jordan, Green Lantern and former protector of Coast City, went berserk when the Guardians of the Universe--his employers, so to speak--refused to let him resurrect his hometown. Wrapped in grief and rage, Hal tried to take by force the power he felt the Guardians owed him. 

His friends stood in his way, so he fought them. 

The Green Lantern Corps stood in his way, so he destroyed them. 

The Guardians stood in his way, so he killed them. 

Hub City was lost in the shuffle. The Question was kicking the teeth out of muggers with extreme prejudice and trying to arrest garbage cans; Hal Jordan was trying to wipe out the universe and rewrite it to his liking. 

Priorities, priorities. 

Hal was eventually dealt with and the heroes who had stopped him straggled home, more weary and disheartened than triumphant. There was no joy in fighting, possibly killing, one of their own. 

No one had the heart for another confrontation so soon, and the Question hadn't actually _killed_ anyone, after all . . . 

Somehow it had been left at that. The Question wandered through the rotting streets of Hub City, dispensing his own bloody brand of justice, and the rest of the world hung back and pretended not to see. Privately, a lot of people felt that anyone who willingly lived in Hub City _deserved_ a good solid kick, for either their stubbornness or their stupidity. In any case, there was an unspoken agreement that it was best to let the Question be. 

Of course, Blue Beetle reflected crossly, it was a lot easier to let him be when he didn't invade your _house._ The fact that the Question had left Hub City for the first time in years to look for _him_ knotted his stomach. 

Still, Blue Beetle was an optimist. He looked at the man in the faceless mask sitting in his armchair, staining the already worn upholstery with his rain-splattered coat, and willed himself to see a somewhat eccentric superhero in plainclothes rather than a crazed lunatic with violent tendencies. He could almost see it. _Almost._ If he squinted. 

"So . . . Question . . ." He tried hard to make his voice casual and friendly. _"Why_ were you looking for me again?" 

The Question was standing now, poking around at the half-finished inventions cluttering Beetle's dresser. "Years ago. Chicago. Youth gangs. The Muse." 

"Erm . . . yeah, we sure fixed him, huh? The good old days. Right." Beetle couldn't believe that the Question had dropped by merely to reminisce about their single team-up. (Besides, the Muse had really been pretty pathetic. A guy who became a supervillain because his mob boss father wouldn't let him be a _Shakespearean actor?_ If Booster ever found out about this guy he'd never let Beetle live it down.) 

"You had gadgets," the Question said, "for everything. That you made yourself?" 

"Well, I sure didn't buy them at K-Mart," Beetle said cautiously. "Why?" 

"You know electronics. Computers." The Question examined something that looked like a gutted pocketwatch. "Need that knowledge myself." 

"Have you tried _Windows for Dummies?"_

"Joking, Blue Beetle?" The Question turned towards him, crossing his arms. "Might have expected. No surprise that _you_ wouldn't see the danger when no one else does." 

"What's _that_ supposed to mean?" Beetle asked somewhat indignantly. 

"Means you have a reputation. Laughing. Joking. Not serious." 

Beetle shrugged. "So I like my work. Sue me." 

"You see life how you want it. Bright. Harmless. Light." The Question's uneven timbre made the familiar words seem strange. "Nice dream, but only a dream. Reality is hard . . . dark . . . sharp. You don't see." 

"Maybe _you_ don't see, being stuck in the shadows all the time," Beetle ventured. 

"There _are_ shadows," said the Question. "That proves me right." 

"Mmm, talk about the power of positive thinking. I'll bet you're a real hit at parties. Maybe you and Bats should get together sometime," Beetle said without thinking, then frowned. "I mean . . ." 

"Ah. Batman. The Dark Knight. Now the Dead Knight." 

Beetle's eyes narrowed. "Was that another joke? Because I'm not laughing." 

"No joke. _Truth._ Not happy or funny, but real. See? You can't handle it--have to cover it up with quips or pretend it's not there." 

"Jealous because I can deal with loss without handing out compound fractures, Question? _You're_ the one who seems to be making puns about my dead friend." 

"'Friend'." Despite his facelessness, Beetle had the impression that the Question was staring at him. "Knew you were naive, but hard to believe you're _that_ naive." 

Blue Beetle bristled. "Just what the hell do you _want,_ Question? Tell me why I'm sitting here in my pajamas being lectured by the posterchild for metahuman psychological disorders." 

"Psychological disorder?" The Question tilted his head back so that his smooth, empty eyesockets gathered the shadows. "Convenient label slapped on the sane in an insane world." 

Blue Beetle's stomach lurched a bit as he suddenly remembered that he was unarmed and the Question was quite, quite mad. He tried to make his voice as neutral as possible as he asked, "So what _are_ you after? You need help choosing out a laptop or what?" 

"Not quite, Blue Beetle." The Question's uneven voice was strangely calm. "Need help breaking into the JLA Watchtower." 

  



	5. Chapter 4: Calling the Cavalry

  


_**Chapter Four**_

* * *

Blue Beetle considered gasping "You're insane!" or "That's crazy!", but rejected the remarks as redundant. At last he asked, _"Why?"_

"Have to save the world."

"By _invading the Watchtower??"_

"Of course."

"And _how_ will this save humanity, dare I ask?"

The Question said nothing.

It was time to get back-up, Beetle decided. He swung out of bed and headed for the doorway.

"Where are you going?" the Question asked, trailing after him.

"I need coffee," Beetle said, pulling on his mask with a touch of defiance as he headed for the kitchen. 

"Should get moving soon; don't want to waste time."

"So move," Blue Beetle said, rooting through the cupboards and edging ever closer to the phone by the fridge.

"Meant _we_ should get moving," the Question corrected himself, picking up some half-formed inventions scattered on the counters.

"I need coffee," Beetle repeated, opening a cupboard so that it blocked the Question's view of him . . . and the telephone. Very casually, he reached for it . . . picked it up . . . 

"Cut the phone lines on the way in, by the way."

"Did you? Oh _good,"_ Beetle said crossly, hanging up the receiver after confirming that there was no dial tone. He pulled out the jar of instant coffee. He really _did_ need some caffeination at this point.

"We should get moving," the Question repeated, shifting restlessly.

"The world-saving can wait ten minutes," Blue Beetle said, trying to remember where he'd last seen his cell phone. "How were you going to save us all, again?"

"Break into the Watchtower."

"Mmm. A pretty one-note plan, if you don't mind me saying . . ." The living room. That's right, he'd ordered pizza on the cell in the living room on Friday. Beetle grabbed his cup of coffee and moved out of the kitchen and towards the couch. "If you need to get into the Watchtower so badly, why don't you just _ask_ the JLA?" 

The Question didn't look up from his examination of a smooth, nearly spherical gadget he'd found in the kitchen. "The JLA?"

"Uh . . . yeah. I mean, it is _their_ headquarters and all . . ." Beetle spotted the edge of the cell phone peeking out from the fringe of the couch. 

"Who do you think I'm saving us from?" the Question asked, turning towards Blue Beetle as he lost interest the vaguely scarab-themed invention and tossed it aside.

Beetle's eyes widened behind his goggles as he watched the object drop. "No, don't--!"

A cloud of thick black smoke hissed from the gas grenade as it hit the floor. Surprised, the Question took several steps backwards, disappearing behind a wall of swirling smoke. Beetle heard something crash to the floor and surmised that the Question had kicked over the lamp. At least Beetle had the distraction he'd been craving; he quickly grabbed the cell phone from under the couch as he tried to suppress a coughing fit.

He automatically started dialing Booster's number before remembering that Booster was currently in no condition to help anyone, _if_ he was even conscious. He could call Fire . . . no, wait, she'd moved. Black Canary. Better yet--Oracle. And she was on speed-dial--perfect. Third button down. Or maybe second. The smoke was making his eyes water behind his goggles, but he was almost positive it was the third button . . . He pressed it just as the smoke alarm went off.

Beetle winced, cupping his hand over the receiver as the piercing, automated shrieks pounded between his temples. Overhead came the loud THUMP THUMP THUMP of an irate neighbor establishing his displeasure at the noise. 

"Things aren't so great down here either, buddy," Beetle muttered between coughs as he stumbled into the bedroom. He began prying open the windows while holding the phone wedged between his head and his shoulder. Between his mask and the fire alarm, he could barely hear the phone pick up. 

"It's Beetle! No time to explain now," he said in a low voice, just loud enough to be heard over the commotion (he hoped.) "I need help with a grade-A fruitcake. Get over to my apartment ASAP," he finished, taking a quick glance to make sure the Question was still in the living room. Not wanting to risk a confrontation with the Hub City vigilante, he slipped the cell phone into his bathrobe pocket without waiting for a reply.

Perfect timing, since the Question emerged from the smoke-filled living room only a few seconds later. Oddly, he seemed completely unperturbed by the billowing smoke curling around him. He probably had some sort of filter built into his mask . . . Jerk. 

"Very interesting invention, Blue Beetle. Someone's at the door."

"Is there?" Beetle paused. Even Oracle wasn't _that_ fast . . . 

"Sounds upset. Pounding. Threatening. Could be a villain . . ." The Question sounded interested as he craned his neck towards the front entrance.

"Don't. Whatever you're thinking, just . . . don't," Beetle implored as he headed for the front door. The smoke alarm was still screaming, he noted with a wince as he made his way through the living room. 

Kicking a pizza box off the welcome mat, he tried to take a look through the peephole and promptly bonked his goggles against the door. He pulled off his mask with an irate mutter and tried again. A short, squat woman with her hair up in curlers stood on the other side of the door, her face creased in a permanent scowl. Beetle hastily took a step back as she pounded on the door again, making it tremble.

"Oh God . . . it's my landlady . . . "

"Move aside. Glad to help," the Question offered, cracking his knuckles.

"No! Just go . . . go do something about the stupid smoke alarm."

The Question shrugged, but he went. Blue Beetle took a deep breath, immediately regretted it as the apartment was still inundated with smoke, and cracked open the door the tiniest little bit, peering over the door chain. "Why, Mrs. Sweeney, what a pleasant sur--"

"You listen to me, hotshot! You think you can stay up until all hours of the night wakin' up decent folk?? Do you have any idea what time it is? ANY IDEA?? An' I thought I made it perfectly clear that I do NOT tolerate SMOKERS, mister!!"

"No, no you've got it all wrong! I was, uh, cooking dinner and the, um, the steaks caught fire--" 

"Cooking--at two AM??" She scowled. "An' let me tell you something else--you'd better quit that racket before--"

"It's just the smoke alarm! If you give me a few minutes I'll be glad to go turn it off--"

From the interior of the apartment came a sound like metal and plastic being crushed and the piercing beeps ended abruptly.

"Oh . . . how fortunate. The . . . batteries must have gone dead." Beetle kept his smile, but barely. "Now if you'll excuse me--very tired--need some sleep--" He slammed the door and shot the deadbolt into place, half-listening the crescendoing protests of his landlady in the hallway. He breathed a sigh of relief when he finally heard her footsteps stump away. 

He stepped into the living room and looked at the remains of the smoke detector, which the Question had silenced with one high kick. "You _could've_ just taken the batteries out."

"Not my style."

"I'll bet." He wondered how long he'd have to wait for Oracle's agent, Black Canary, to show up. If he could just keep stalling . . . "Um, would you like some coffee?"

"No. We should go."

"What's the rush? This'll keep you alert." Beetle moved into the kitchen and picked up the jar of instant coffee.

"Already alert. We should go _now_ . . . Ted."

Beetle froze for just an second before he continued scooping coffee crystals into a cup. "I thought you didn't know my secret identity."

"Didn't. Now I do." The Question held up a handful of crumpled bills, all neatly addressed to Blue Beetle's alter ego. "We should go, Mr. Kord."

Beetle calmly put down the jar of coffee. "Okay. Fine. You win, you little--" He took a deep breath and cut himself off. "Just let me get dressed. I'm not going anywhere in a bathrobe. And try to find some more of those smoke grenades while you're at it; it never hurts to have a few extra." He walked into the bedroom, hoping that his request would keep the Question occupied for a few minutes. Beetle took a deep breath as he leaned with his back against the locked door. 

"Where?" the Question's lopsided voice came from the living room.

"Check under the couch. And in the hall closet," he called back. Blue Beetle thought fast. He could escape through the bedroom window, but then the Question would probably compromise his secret identity faster than he could say "crazed vigilante." But Black Canary should arrive soon . . . He grabbed a pen off his dresser and scribbled a hasty note on the back of an envelope.

_Canary - _

Bad news. The Question showed up here   
(completely nuts) and I have to play along   
with him for now. (Long story. Knows my  
secret identity.) He thinks the world's  
in danger from the JLA or something.

Help?

BB

That would have to do. Beetle changed into his costume and reentered the living room with the envelope casually folded in his hand. The Question was waiting, holding five gas grenades in the crook of his arm. 

"You found that many?" Beetle said, genuinely surprised.

"Two under the couch. One in the closet. One behind the TV. One in the flour bin." 

"Huh. Well . . ." Beetle moved aside a painting to reveal a control pad and tapped in a certain code, cupping his left hand over the keypad to prevent the Question from seeing the numbers. The mechanical trapdoor in the floor slid open again. " . . . after you."

The Question nodded, cautiously lowering himself into the tunnel below. Blue Beetle followed, but not before dropping his note on the chair next to the trapdoor, where it would be immediately noticeable to Black Canary (he hoped.)

They travelled through the underground tunnel in silence until they reached the sub-level of the warehouse that stored the Bug. "So you were the one who turned the radar on?" Beetle asked, not at all pleased with the thought of the Question touching the Bug's controls--or _being_ in the Bug, for that matter.

"Had to make sure no one was following," the Question said. "Never know when they're watching."

"Riiiight. Well, let's . . . what are you doing?"

What the Question was doing, to all appearances, was pausing beside the entrance of the tunnel to retrieve a flat, rectangular object wrapped in part of a shiny black garbage bag.

"Left this here for safe keeping . . ."

"What is it?" When the Question didn't answer, he apprehensively asked, "It's not a bomb, is it?"

"No, not explosive. Not a weapon. Not the way _you_ mean," he added, securing the bag under his trenchcoat.

Beetle decided not to press the point. "Well, all onboard the Bug Express . . ."

The Question took his seat in front of one of the viewports as Blue Beetle booted up the Bug, which hummed quietly as he maneuvered it out the airlock, into the bay, and finally into the cloud-filled sky. Beetle flew low, making no effort to conceal the Bug; the more people saw the airship, the easier Oracle would be able to track it and direct Canary to it. (Actually, he suspected she could hunt the Bug down electronically whether anyone saw it or not, but better safe than sorry.)

As he double-checked his coordinates, Beetle found himself hoping that Black Canary had the sense not to make a big production of her entrance . . . Ted Kord would have enough troubles explaining himself to his landlady without superheroes flooding his apartment.

He comforted himself with the thought that Black Canary and Oracle worked out of Gotham, and no one knew the importance of keeping secrets like Gotham's backalley heroes . . .

Back in Beetle's apartment, the remains of the smoke alarm hung from the ceiling, a stringy tangle of crushed plastic and exposed wires. It swung gently back and forth, its tempo gradually speeding up as a nearly imperceptible trembling in the foundation of the building slowly defined itself. The tremor didn't feel like an earthquake so much as the shockwave of an explosion, if an explosion could contain itself instead of expending all its energies. Bits of plaster spiraled from the ceiling as the vibrations increased into a low, powerful rumble swiftly approaching from underground. Blue Beetle's impromptu note quivered, fluttering off the edge of the couch as the rumble grew to a roar.

The envelope had barely settled on the carpet when it was blasted back into the air, half-incinerated in an explosive concussion that effortlessly punched through the steel trapdoor. The flare of energy briefly highlighted the apartment in a blinding torrent of light, but the illumination quickly faded, leaving the room in darkness once more.

Only now the darkness settled around a gleam of metallic skin faintly lit by a pair of blazing yellow eyes . . .

  


  



	6. Chapter 5: All Dressed Up

  


_**Chapter Five**_

* * *

The stranger invading Blue Beetle's apartment paused to survey his surrounding, his pupilless yellow eyes lingering on the gutted smoke detector. He peered around, cautiously stepping across the room to try the lightswitch. When it didn't work, he balled up one fist; within seconds, energy crackled around his hand, flashing between red and yellow as the sparks highlighted his sleek ribcage.

His exploration of the apartment took only a few minutes, beginning in the kitchen and ending in the bathroom adjoined to the main bedroom (after a brief interlude that included blasting the lock off the second bedroom and nearly being buried in a cascade of beetle-shaped inventions.) He picked up the still-damp toothbrush by the sink, then set it down again. He frowned thoughtfully and, looking up, saw his reflection frown back at him. Taking a few steps back, he paused a moment to examine himself in the mirror. 

From behind he appeared to be a well-muscled man, perhaps an inch or two over six feet, with silvery metallic skin. Indeed, his muscles could be observed with ease, since he also appeared to be naked. From the front, he appeared to be a well-muscled man who was, thankfully, not _quite_ anatomically correct enough to be arrested for indecent exposure.

He was Captain Atom, and the government wouldn't let him wear pants.

He _tried_ not to stew over it. Bad enough that he'd been framed for treason, bounced forward two decades in an experiment that could be summed up as "exploding a nuke under a guy sitting in remnants of an alien craft to see, out of curiosity, what would happen", and finally blackmailed into being a government issue superhero, but why in God's name wouldn't the military let their secret weapon wear _pants?_

True, they had decorated portions of his skin with "laser-dyes", whatever those were, coloring most of his lower arms red and his legs from the calves down blue, as well as slapping a red atomic symbol on his chest, but even that wasn't like having _real_ boots and gloves; it was more like having pictures of boots and gloves painted onto your flesh. And it _certainly_ wasn't like having pants. 

The fact that the military had pushed him to get as much publicity as possible hadn't helped. There was nothing quite like being shoved towards a mass of lights and cameras while battling the urge to cover your more sensitive areas and back away. But the government held all the cards when it came to Captain Atom; all his angry protests were met with calm, superior smiles and questions dropped in casual, condescending tones. He wanted to be pardoned, didn't he? He wanted to see his kids again, didn't he? And his wife--how frantic he'd been, wondering what had happened to her, where she was. He wanted to know, didn't he?

Yes. Yes he did. So he played along, forcing a smile as he was interviewed by _Life_ and _Time_ and _Nightline_, regurgitating the false origin the military had fabricated for him, since "condemned traitor forced to be a guinea pig in an atomic experiment" wouldn't win him any popularity points with Joe Public.

He'd thought that would be enough, but of course that was naive. It was _never_ enough. As the sticks got bigger and the carrots continued to dangle just out of reach, he found himself automatically playing along. Playing the superhero. Infiltrating Justice League International. _Spying_ on Justice League International. Lying about his ambitions and his past and his powers until it became second nature.

The government created a tagline for him--all well-known superheroes had taglines, apparently. They called him "the Silver Savior." He hated the phrase. Maybe he'd gained a variety of atomic abilities, but the so-called Silver Savior hadn't been able to save anything important to him at all. Not his family. Not his freedom. Not even his self-respect. As closely as his metallic skin adhered to his body, the silver lie that had become his life clung closer.

They'd finally told him what had become of his wife, at least.

She was dead.

"Brooding much tonight, Nate?" he murmured, shaking himself out of his reverie. (Technically the military had renamed him Cameron Scott, but he still thought of himself as Nathaniel Adam, or Nate.) "What you _should_ be asking yourself is 'Where the hell is the Blue Beetle?'"

He surveyed the empty bedroom again, wondering if he should have alerted his superiors so he could've brought some back up from the air force or army. But he was on leave for once and wanted to stay as far away from the military for as long as he could. Besides, the Beetle had always been protective of his secret identity . . . 

(An uncomfortable shadow of suspicion skittered across Nate's mind, but he shoved it ruthlessly aside. Surely even the Blue Beetle didn't hold grudges _that_ long. Right?)

"Probably just another stupid prank from Blue and Gold," the Captain said to himself, but he was still frowning. The phone call hadn't _sounded_ like a joke . . . Beetle's hushed voice nearly drowned out by the screaming alarms in the background, but distinct enough for Captain Atom to clearly hear "Help . . . ASAP . . . apartment." More than enough to make Nate slip out of bed (being careful not to wake his wife--after years of grieving he had finally found someone he loved enough to make him remarry), and change from Major Cameron Scott, whose only extraordinary feature was prematurely white hair, into the silver-skinned Captain Atom.

Well, now he was here, and Beetle wasn't, and he'd accidentally torn through the trapdoor on the way in to boot. Now what? 

He returned to the living room and stared at the smoke detector. It looked like someone had kicked it to bits. (It _could_ have been done by Blue Beetle, although Atom had a hard time imagining why he'd trash it quite so _thoroughly.)_ The air still held a thick aftertaste of smoke or gas. Captain Atom tried not to breathe too deeply; bullets might bounce off his skin, but he was just as susceptible to inhalants as anyone else.

"So say Beetle was fighting someone, threw down a smoke canister, and called for help," Captain Atom murmured, thoughtfully tapping a finger against the side of his face. "But why _me?_ Why not call one of his buddies? Booster Gold. Mister Miracle. Guy Gardner, even. Unless . . . " he paused. "Unless it was something big enough that he _needed_ to call me . . ." In terms of raw power, Captain Atom rated just under Superman. In fact, the extent of his atomic abilities always left him with a feeling of supreme discomfort; no human should be able to incinerate a city block or absorb the energy blast from a bomb. Not that he did either of those on a regular basis . . . but he _could._ If the Blue Beetle had come across something where he didn't just want, but _needed_ help from Captain Atom . . . Well, that was bad. Very bad.

"So he calls--then what? Runs before the smoke dissipates, probably. Let's see, where would I run if I were a non-powered vigilante known for inventing things like solar guns, smoke bombs, and a . . . giant . . . airship . . ." 

Captain Atom trailed away. He stood stockstill for just a moment before diving into the secret tunnel, flying down the passageway as fast as he could as he muttered, "Stupid, Nathaniel. Stupid. It wasn't in the hangar. God, why couldn't Blue Beetle get himself into trouble at an hour when my brain's functioning? _Two AM!"_

He swooped into the underground hangar and barely slowed as he flew up a set of concrete stairs, pushing open a door that was disguised to look like a section of the wall from the other side. Now in the topside laboratory of the warehouse, he dodged around oversized monitors and mainframes as he sped towards the outer doors. It was perhaps fortunate that it _was_ two o'clock in the morning, a time when a flying, silver-skinned man bursting out of a warehouse in a flare of atomic energy was less likely to be noticed, even in New York City. 

The Captain soared straight up high enough to get a bird's eye view of the city, then turned in a slow circle as he scanned the horizon. How far could the Beetle's airship have gotten? And just how many places in New York City would be large and remote enough to conceal it? Had Beetle even managed to get away from his antagonist?

Captain Atom might have ranked just below Superman in terms of raw power, but unfortunately that didn't include the telescopic and X-ray vision. Part of him--a fairly large, or at least vocal, part of him--was whispering that it probably one of Blue Beetle's infamous practical jokes anyway, that he should forget about finding the Beetle and just go home. 

With a sigh, Captain Atom chose a direction and flew, his eyes darting right and left over alleyways and brownstones. 

They called him the Silver Savior. 

Maybe tonight it could be true. 

  



	7. Chapter 6: Fighting Blind

  


_**Chapter Six**_

* * *

"Almost there?" asked the Question. He was sitting with his legs tucked neatly under his chair, watching. 

"Oh yeah, definitely," Blue Beetle said, but he kept the Bug soaring at a slow glide. He wanted to give Oracle a chance to martial her forces. Of course, if Babs would only work with more fliers, he wouldn't even have to land . . . Then again, a fight in the Bug could severely damage the airship and Beetle generally didn't encourage the destruction of anything that had the sole responsibility for keeping him aloft several hundred feet above the ground . . . 

Concern for the Bug swiftly replaced concern for New York as Blue Beetle glanced left and did a doubletake. Leaning forward, the Question was fingering the buttons lining the dashboard. Specifically, he seemed attracted to a red button. A big red button. 

"You like that one, do you?" Beetle tried to keep his voice casual. 

"Interesting. Purpose?" 

"I just had that one installed. It one opens a direct line to the New York police department," Blue Beetle said brightly, and was gratified to see the Question jerk his hands back in a manner usually reserved for confrontations with venomous snakes. Still, Blue Beetle decided he'd better land before his passenger's interest revived. He began humming as he piloted the Bug towards the New York branch of Kordtronics. 

Like the warehouse across from Beetle's apartment, Kordtronics had a carefully concealed underwater airlock that allowed the Bug to discreetly enter the secret sub-basement under the office building. Beetle carefully landed the airship and powered it down. 

The Question exited first, peering around suspiciously before leaping the eight feet from the trapdoor in the Bug's belly to the floor. He landed on his feet, with hunched shoulders and his fingers splayed out, paranoid and ready. 

Beetle followed, somersaulting neatly in mid-air, just in case Black Canary was watching. (Like Power Girl always said . . . if you've got it, flaunt it!) He felt mildly disappointed when Canary didn't jump out of the shadows and give the Question a good kick in the head. If this kept up, he was going to have to take the vigilante down all by his lonesome. 

"Onnnne . . . is the loneliest number . . ." Beetle hummed, causing the Question to turn around and aim what was undoubtedly a stare at him, eyeless mask or no. Blue Beetle pretended to ignore him. He could stall for a little while longer, he supposed, waiting for Canary, and if worse came to worse . . . well, at least a fight here would be _somewhat_ easier to conceal than it would've been in his apartment. 

"More computers," the Question observed, turning his attention away from the blue-clad Beetle. "And . . . things. Hm." He examined a table cluttered with half-finished inventions and picked up a cosmic arc-welder. He surreptitiously pocketed it as he moved on, pausing before something that looked like an eight foot tall glass tube with circuitry and wires running down to a surprisingly small box, perhaps twice the size of the average computer, sitting on the floor. "Ah . . . Teleport tubes." 

"Uh . . . yes." Beetle sounded a little miffed; cosmic arc welders were expensive. "It's left over from my Justice League International days. But it won't interface with the current JLA transporters." 

"Not without work," the Question said. 

"Yeah . . . like three months of work funded by tens of thousands of dollars in grant money," Beetle retorted. "We're talking about the _JLA_ here. You know? The JLA? The ones on the moon with the extra-super-extremely-high security system designed by the Prince of Paranoia himself, Batman?" 

"Beyond your abilities? Should have known." 

"This the part where I'm supposed to indignantly throw myself into a frenzy of work to prove that I can _too_ break into the Watchtower, right? Sorry, but no." 

"I _need_ to get into the Watchtower, Blue Beetle." The Question's voice was flat and calm. "You can. I know. The Bug. Mr. Gold's armor. Armaments. You have the skills." 

"The Bug gets blown up every second Sunday and that armor was a last resort for Booster; he hasn't worn it in years," Beetle protested as convincingly as he could. "I can't get you into the Watchtower." 

"Can't? Or _won't?"_ the Question asked, tilting his head to gather the shadows under his nonexistant eyes. 

"Why wouldn't I want to help a fellow superh--er, crimefighter?" Beetle asked, hoping the Question was too far over the edge to guess the obvious answer to his rhetorical question. 

"You don't see. You don't see the need. You still think the world is bright and--" 

"Yeah, I think I remember this lecture," Beetle said drily. "Okay, okay, okay . . . I'll give it a shot. But I can't make any promises." 

"Don't fail," the Question said simply, hoisting himself up onto one of the larger mainframes and sitting with his hands resting on the rectangular, black-wrapped package on his lap. 

"Didn't even cross my mind," Blue Beetle said beneath his breath, gathering a selection of tools off a workbench. A contingency plan was forming in his head, just in case he really was on his own. It _should_ work . . . 

But as his gaze swept the room, Blue Beetle couldn't help wondering where his back-up was. 

Halfway across the city, Captain Atom was standing in a very dirty phone booth. The graffiti scrawled on its walls was barely visible under a grimy, black coating of dirt. Several of the numbers had popped off the phone itself, although several kind souls had generously scratched phone numbers, pointing citizens towards "a good time", into the silver plating around the dial. In addition, someone had stolen the receiver. The phone book had been torn from its stiff, protective plastic covers, though part of it appeared to have been abandoned in the corner, crumpled and stained. 

Captain Atom gingerly picked up the remains of the phone book, using just his thumb and first finger, and backed out of the phone booth, for once wishing for a bottle of disinfectant more than pants. (Well, _both_ would be nice, actually.) 

Handling the tissue-thin paper as little as possible, he flipped through the pages. It was his lucky night, apparently. He actually had the right half of the phone book. 

"Should've thought of this before," Captain Atom--Nate--muttered, moving under a street light to get a better view of the phone book. He turned to the "K" section, suppressing a sudden shadow of guilt as he ran a metallic finger over the listings. At last, he saw a name that gave him pause. 

"Kordtronics," he said to himself, memorizing the address. "It's got to be Kordtronics." And he was off in a dim glow of quantum energy. 

Within minutes, Captain Atom was swooping around a medium-tall office building with the occassional lit window of a workaholic breaking the blackness. Given that Beetle had always prefered underground lairs (although 'lair' perhaps had too ominous a connotation for a hero like Blue Beetle) and that the building was on the waterfront, the next step was obvious. Captain Atom took a deep breath and dove. 

The water was dark; the electric lights of the offices glittered on the face of the river, but broke through the surface only dimly. Atom was forced to come up for air several times, breaking the water with a gasp and tossing his sodden, silver hair out of his eyes before gulping down another lungful of air and going under again. 

Just when Nate was beginning to think that maybe Blue Beetle had decided to simply put his headquarters in a conference room somewhere, he caught a glimpse of something deep in the river. 

He kicked downward, though at this depth it was hard for him to see anything but the twists of metallic hair free-floating in front of him and the bubbles drifting past him, faintly lit by his yellow eyes. But his stretching fingers brushed something solid and steel in front of him: a massive airlock. Captain Atom swam down, braced his feet against the solid surface, dug his fingers into the metal, and slowly pulled it open. 

The rush of water into the opened chamber pushed him forward as he clung awkwardly to the huge metal door. He quickly flew in and pushed the doors closed again before the room could be flooded completely. Drains in the floor automatically opened as the hydraulic doors hissed shut and the water began to disappear. 

Captain Atom hovered for a minute, breathing in the fresh air, before flying to the opposite end of the airlock and pushing open an identical set of looming steel doors. But whereas the other doors opened onto the river, this one opened into a sub-basement which was considerably more spacious than the average office floor in order to accomodate the Bug. 

It had been a long time since Captain Atom had seen Blue Beetle's airship; he had forgotten how big it was. Still, it only took him a few seconds to fly around the ship. Peering through the machine's yellow viewports, he confirmed that there was no one inside. It appeared to have been landed normally; he didn't _see_ any damage . . . 

With a frown, Captain Atom landed and walked away from the Bug, ready to cautiously explore the parts of the underground complex that were obscured by banks of towering mainframes, monitors, and less identifiable equipment. 

He had gone about twenty feet when he nearly tripped over the Blue Beetle. 

The Beetle was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, leaning over some sort of electronic gadget as he gripped a screwdriver between his teeth. He was humming. And not, apparently, in any sort of desparate, mortal danger. 

Captain Atom fought the urge to zap him with a quantum bolt, or at least smack him. 

Instead, he stood with his arms crossed as he gave the Blue Beetle his best disapproving stare. Blue Beetle continued working on his . . . electronic-gadgety-thingie . . . and after a few minutes the muscles in Captain Atom's face began to clench painfully. 

"Problems, Beetle?" Atom asked in a somewhat annoyed voice, ready to change tactics. 

"Mm-hm . . ." Beetle confirmed without looking up. After a minute or two he mumbled "Transistor won't respond" around the screwdriver by way of addendum. 

He _could_ have been kidding, but he probably wasn't; the world really did stop existing for Blue Beetle when he was working on a project. Or so it had been back in their JLI days. 

Well, the more things changed, the more they stayed the same . . . and Captain Atom had always been a bit hot-tempered. "BEETLE!" he barked. 

"What _is it_, Atom?" Blue Beetle asked in annoyance, finally looking up. His eyes widened behind his goggles and his mouth dropped open, letting the screwdriver clatter to the floor. "Waitaminute--_Captain Atom??_ What are YOU doing here? Don't tell me you're in on his little plan--" 

_"What_ plan? _Whose_ plan? Why did you _call_ me? I thought you needed _help,_ Beetle," the Captain said in an accusatory voice. "If I find out this is one of your practical jokes that you and Gold set up . . ." 

Blue Beetle stared at him blankly for a minute, then clapped a blue-gloved hand over his goggles. Captain Atom barely heard him mutter, "Ohhhh man, speed dial . . . Oy." 

"Would you please start making some kind of sense?" In spite of himself, Captain Atom heard his voice rise. "Listen, Beetle, do you know what I had planned for tonight? _Sleep._ Not wandering around New York at 2 AM thinking you'd tangled with God-knows-what! I think you owe me an explanation or an apology or both! What the hell are you up to?" 

"Why don't you ask Mr. Paranoia over there? He's got a stylin' hat, a great sense of humor, and he's been calling the shots all night." 

Captain Atom whirled and found himself staring at a man clad in a dirty trenchcoat and hat sitting unobtrusively on a large mainframe, legs crossed and faceless face tilted towards him. "The Question." 

"Indeed." The reply was quiet, but oddly uneven in timbre. "Don't recall inviting Captain Atom, Beetle." 

"Ah . . . well . . ." Beetle stalled. "I thought you might want some muscle when you went to *AHEM* invade the Watchtower." He gave Captain Atom a meaningful look as the metallic-skinned hero's yellow eyes widened. _Invade the Watchtower??_ He'd known the Question was a few bananas short of a bunch, but . . . 

"Are you NUTS?" the Captain demanded. 

Beetle, who had begun working on his electronic device again, looked up long enough to give the Captain a _look._ "Ye-es," he said under his breath, just loud enough for Nate to hear. 

"Not nuts," the Question corrected. "Doing what has to be done. Saving the world." 

"How will breaking into the Watchtower--?" 

"Don't bother, I already tried that line," Beetle said. The device he was working sent up a few sparks and suddenly hummed to life. "Hey, whaddaya know--I got the sucker working!" 

"What are you--" Captain Atom turned and took a better look at Blue Beetle's project. "Hey, that's connected to a transporter tube! You're not _helping_ him??" 

Beetle was smiling, but with clenched teeth. "I didn't exactly have a lot of _choice_, Atom, unless I wanted to turn my apartment into a battle zone. Kind of hard to keep a secret identity once you start kicking costumed types out the windows, y'know? You remember the concept? _ Secret identities?"_

They stared at each other with eyes locked until Captain Atom broke away, turning towards the Question. "Well, whatever your scheme was, Question, you can forget it. No way am I letting you have access to the Watchtower." 

"Not going to let the government's pet superhero stop me." 

Captain Atom bristled. "Oh YEAH? Even when the government's _pet_ can do _this?"_ He aimed his fists at the Question as they began to glow, crackling with energy. "Quantum blasts, Question. One false move and I'll fry you down to your atoms." 

Captain Atom waited. The Question tilted his head. Blue Beetle seemed to be holding his breath. 

"Very well," the Question said at last. "Can tell when I'm beaten." 

"Okay then, come down off of there--_slowly_--and . . . What have you got there? Beetle, what's he got there?" Captain Atom demanded, craning his neck to get a better look at the rectangular package the Question held. 

"I don't know, but he _said_ it wasn't explosive." Blue Beetle's tone suggested that he didn't place a great deal of confidence into anything the Question said. 

"Not explosive," the Question assured, carefully slipping the package, in its torn garbage-bag wrapper, beneath his trenchcoat. He slipped off the bank of computers, landing neatly on his feet, and started moving towards Captain Atom. 

"Thaaat's right . . . nice and easy . . ." Nate said, already estimating how much time it would take to wrap up the situation and fly home. Even if the Question tried to fight him, none of his blows could even bruise Captain Atom's alien-alloy skin. Anyway, the Hub City vigilante didn't seem to be looking for a fight, walking with his back straight and his hands in his pockets . . . 

Blue Beetle's eyes suddenly widened behind his goggles. "Atom, look out! He's got--" 

The Question flew into a high kick, throwing all his weight against Captain Atom's chest. Nate didn't feel a thing, but it did knock him off his feet for just a second . . . long enough to look up and see the Question's trenchcoat swirling as he lobbed four scarab-shaped grenades directly at him. And then the world exploded into choking clouds of smoke. 

Captain Atom pushed himself to his feet, stumbling slightly. His eyes watered as he spun around, trying to see through rolling plumes of blackness. He gasped, gagging as his throat burned . . . if he could just get out of it . . . Low intensity quantum blast might burn it away--no, he couldn't, couldn't risk hurting the Question or Blue Beetle--He felt himself keeling-- 

Suddenly, something was being pressed over his face. He shook his head, with a vague idea of fighting off his attacker, but stopped when he took a breath that had only a faint taste of smoke to it. He opened his eyes and found Blue Beetle pressing a small gas mask, about the size of his palm, over his nose and mouth. 

Beetle was wearing a gas mask as well, but his eyes, despite his goggles, were squinched up and watering badly. 

"Where . . . is he?" Captain Atom demanded. He tried, unsteadily, to stand, but was pushed back down by Beetle. 

"Don't move. You've just had four times your daily recommended dosage of smoke inhalation." 

"I'm fine." His head was already clearing. "The Question . . ." He twisted around, trying to peer through the billowing clouds of smoke. 

"Will you _please_ stay still? Don't worry, he's not going to attack. He's headed for the transport tube--" 

Captain Atom pushed the Blue Beetle aside. "Hey!" Beetle protested as Nate's surge of quantum-powered strength sent the bug-themed superhero skidding across the floor. 

"The transport tube--? The _Watchtower!"_ Captain Atom held one hand clamped over his gas mask as he flew in what he hoped was the right direction. 

"Atom--!" Beetle actually managed to catch Nate's ankles as he charge by. 

Captain Atom barely noticed, pulling the Blue Beetle along in his wake. Flying straight into the smoke made its effects all the worse; he could barely keep his eyes slitted open against the stinging smoke clouds. But he caught a flash of movement . . . A faint gleam of light off what could be glass, a faint swirl that could have been a trenchcoat . . . And the faint sound like a computer when it's just booting up . . . Captain Atom closed his eyes and redoubled his speed. If he could just knock out the teleporter . . . 

Beetle was bracing his feet, futilely trying to slow down the atomic powered hero. "Atom, _wait!"_

But it was too late to wait. Captain Atom felt himself crash through the glass of the transport tube and immediately tried to pin the Question. Blue Beetle, thanks to the Captain's sudden stop and Newton's first law, slammed into Atom's back, resulting in a sort of superheroic dogpile. 

It wouldn't have been a problem, except . . . 

"Hey, it didn't stop!" Captain Atom rose his voice to be heard over the ever-increasing hum of electronics. "The sequence didn't stop!" 

"Of course it didn't stop! All you did was splinter some non-vital components!" Beetle said frantically, trying to regain his feet. "Get up get up get up! We've got to get out of here bef--" 

The rest of Blue Beetle's sentence faded away as their atoms tore apart in a surprisingly anti-climatic blaze of light. 

  



	8. Chapter 7: Men on the Moon

  


_**Chapter Seven**_

* * *

"--fore the sequence completes!" Blue Beetle finished, already knowing it was too late as he felt himself lurch into existence again, atom by atom. 

"I'll never get used to that." Captain Atom looked slightly ill. "Where _are_ we?" 

"The Watchtower, where else?" Blue Beetle pushed his way out of the teleport tube and looked around at the imposing, sleek decor. Whoever had designed the Watchtower had had a fondness for stainless steel and Star Trek. The Next Generation, judging from the doors--which were, incidentally, swiftly sliding shut. "That's one small teleport for man, one giant teleport for manki--" 

"The _Watchtower??_ You were actually going to give this lunatic," Captain Atom stood, gripping the Question by the collar of his trenchcoat, "access to the Watchtower?? What would you have done if I hadn't come along??" 

"Oh, hmmm, let me think . . . well, I probably would've let the binary transition codes I installed in _my_ teleport tube summon the Watchtower's automated internal defense system." Blue Beetle crossed his arms in satisfaction. "Hark! Is that the 'vhhhhmmmmmm' of lasers warming up that I hear?" 

"Deceitful, Blue Beetle." The Question twisted out of Captain Atom's grip. 

"I prefer to think of it as _resourcefulness._ Now I _could_ 'port out of here and leave you to face the music, but because I'm a generous guy, I'm going to give you the option of just teleporting back to Hub City right now--" 

The Question moved without warning, kicking high. Beetle neatly caught the vigilante's foot, holding it hovering inches from his goggles. 

"--or," Blue Beetle concluded, "we could do the gratuitous fight thing." He shifted his grip on the Question's ankle and swung him away, sending his opponent tumbling, but the Question righted himself in midair and landed on his feet, skidding backwards with arms outstretched. 

"Good, Blue Beetle. But not good enough." 

The Question leapt. Blue Beetle barely dodged a shoe . . . then a fist. As he dodged a second swing, he wondered why he bothered trying to reason with people intent on rearranging his face. They _never_ listened. 

"Beetle, get out of the _way,"_ Captain Atom called, skirting the fight as quantum energy built up around his fists. "I can't tag him when he's in hand-to-hand with you!" 

"Well, ex_cuse_ me!" Beetle replied, not taking his eyes off his opponent. The cramped quarters favored the Question's close combat melee style over Blue Beetle's prefered method, which utilised the open space and varied elevations--both of which were distinctly missing from the sealed room. 

"Concentrate," he reminded himself, rolling back to get some breathing room. "Focus." He fell into a fighting stance himself as the Question approached, a whirling dervish of trenchcoat . . . then blinked as a silvery blur slammed into the Question. 

"Game over, Question," Captain Atom growled, pinning the vigilante against the wall. 

"Nnngh . . ." 

"You know, I had the situation under control," Beetle said, straightening with a glare. Silver show-off. 

"Under control? All you were doing was holding him off," the Captain replied without looking up. 

"All I _had_ to do was hold him off--for another thirty seconds, maybe. Long enough for the automated defenses to warm up." Beetle paused, listening to the faint hum that permeated the room, unnoticeable unless a conscious effort was made to perceive it. "The stun rays or freeze guns or whatever Steel and Bats cooked up would've taken him down." 

"Oh yeah?" Captain Atom pulled the Question away from the wall a little ways, firmly securing the masked man's hands behind his back. "What about us, though?" 

"Hey, we're former Leaguers. No way the Watchtower would target us--" 

The Question suddenly twisted in Captain Atom's grasp, turning in the folds of his trenchcoat to deliver a solid kick to his captor's solar plexus. Even the invunerable have a center of gravity; Captain Atom stumbled backwards as the Question simultaneously slipped out of his trenchcoat and spun to hurl a gas grenade at him. The Captain saw it coming and instinctively aimed a quantum blast at the projectile, barely missing. 

"--as long as we don't . . . do anything . . . overtly . . . aggressive," Beetle finished, watching part of the wall sizzle and melt as Atom's assault lit into it. He suppressed a sigh of annoyance (because of the billowing smoke) as he slipped his gas mask back on. Judging from the coughing across the room, Captain Atom hadn't kept hold of his own gas mask after their arrival. Well, where would he have put it, after all? No pockets. "Honestly," Beetle muttered. "Why doesn't the man just wear pants?" 

His reflections on pants were interrupted by a pleasant synthesized voice issuing from the walls. "Hostile actions detected. Please deactivate all weapons and stand down. Repeat: please stand down. A JLA representative will be with you shortly. Thank you . . . and have a nice day." 

A nice day. Riiiight. Well, judging from the sounds coming from the center of the room, neither the Captain nor the Question were standing down. Beetle cautiously edged forward to assess the situation. He spotted Captain Atom first, his silvery skin tarnished by smoke. Tears streamed from the Captain's yellow eyes as he stared around, squinching his eyes shut and then forcing them open again against the stinging smoke. One metallic hand was clapped over his mouth, muffling his coughing, while the other was curled into a fist that blazed with quantum energy. 

Blue Beetle found himself wishing that he'd brought another gas mask, but how was he to know he'd need more than two in one night? At any rate, at least he'd found Captain Atom. Now where was-- 

Beetle felt a rush of air as something whooshed past him and crashed into the Captain's back. Ah, there he was. The Question. 

The gas camoflagued the Hub City vigilante, but Beetle could see his dark form sillouetted against Captain Atom's metallic skin as he kicked the Captain backwards. Unhurt, Atom stopped in mid-fall, and flew, literally, straight at the Question. The vigilante agilely whirled out of the way of the charge, however, and even managed to get in a high kick that sent Captain Atom tumbling off course. Blue Beetle winced as the Captain's momentum slammed him right into a wall. 

"You okay?" he asked as he approached Captain Atom, who was currently embedded in a self-made indentation in the wall. 

"I'm . . . uhn . . . fine." The government superhero extracted himself with a crunch of metal. "Little bastard . . ." he muttered through a bout of coughing. "Not _hurting_ me, but I can't keep him down . . . An' can't see a damn thing . . ." 

"You need to keep him as far away as possible," Beetle advised, staring through the smoke as best he could; his own eyes were watering pretty severely too, goggles or no. "Once he gets in close, it's over. Bullets may bounce of your stainless steel skin, but you've got the same _mass_ as anybody and he's got the laws of physics on his side . . . not to mention a mean right hook. He's gotta be bruising his knuckles, though . . . " 

"Hope he breaks his damn hand . . . There!" Captain Atom straightened suddenly as he stared at a swirling patch of smoke. 

Beetle squinted. "Yeah, that could be--" He paused as two blasts of quantum energy streaked past him, briefly illuminating the smokeclouds before impacting with the floor near the center of the room. "Atom? What are you doing?" 

"Keeping him back. Don't worry, I'm aiming in front of him, not _at_ him . . . Don't want to kill him. Too much paperwork." 

"Atom--" 

"Hostile actions continue. You will be neutralized until a JLA representative is available. We apologize for the inconvenience," the calm, computerized voice kicked in just as Captain Atom fired two more bolts. 

"--that was a really stupid thing to do," Blue Beetle finished, dodging out of the way as a volley of lasers lanced towards them. 

"I didn't see you offering any better ideas!" Captain Atom flew backwards as a volley of laserfire followed him. "At least they'll be trying to take the Question down too--" 

"Well, I want to know why _I'm_ being targeted," Beetle said, ducking a barrage of yellow bolts himself. "What is this--guilt by association?" 

Both heroes suddenly swiveled to the left as they heard something roll across the floor with a metallic skitter and bump gently across the wall a foot or two away. 

"What is it?" Blue Beetle asked, narrowly avoid another attack from the Watchtower's defense systems. 

"It's . . ." Captain Atom squinted. "Damn it, it's _another_ gas grenade! How many does he HAVE?" 

"Five." Beetle ticked them off on his fingers. "He used four in Kordtronics and one when he got here, soooo . . ." He paused, frowning. 

"So this makes six," the Captain said in confusion. 

Beetle pushed him aside, took a look himself, and promptly panicked. "Oh _crap."_

The explosion blossomed in fiery red, blazing through the smoke to reflect in a dying sunset spectrum off the metallic walls. Blue Beetle had just enough time to wonder if he'd made a will before something half-dragged, half-knocked him across the room, away from the exploding debris and buckling wall. As the blast punched through six inches of steel as if it was tinfoil, shrapnel whistled through the air. By some miracle, none of the razor-sharp metal caught him, but he did find himself suddenly airborne as his source of transportation was knocked away. Twisting in midair, Blue Beetle still would've landed on his feet if the shockwave hadn't caught him. He landed hard. 

It took Beetle a few moments to recover enough to sit up, and a few more moments for him to realize that Captain Atom had probably saved his life by pushing him away from the blast and catching most of the deadly shrapnel with his nigh-invunerable stainless steel body. Beetle supposed he should thank the Captain; protocols were protocols, he reminded himself with distaste, glancing around. 

Then he looked around again, more carefully, this time scanning over the shattered, smoking metal which had formerly served as the wall. 

"Ah . . . Atom?" 

Blue Beetle rose to his feet and turned in a slow circle. 

"Captain Atom?" 

He heard a faint scratch of metal against metal behind him and turned to see a silvery form, covered liberally with scorch marks, pushing his way from underneath a sea of scrap metal and slag. 

"Did I mention what a _fun_ night this has been?" Captain Atom asked, causing several hundred pounds of wreckage to shift as he stood. 

"Mm," Blue Beetle said neutrally. Deeming that the moment to thank the atomic superhero had passed, he instead asked, "Why didn't you absorb the energy of the blast?" 

Captain Atom paused in his attempts to brush off his silvery skin to give Blue Beetle a look of amazement. "I was a little _distracted,_ Beetle." 

Beetle simultaneously shrugged and stepped to one side to avoid getting hit with a somewhat dim and half-hearted laser blast from one of the few arrays that hadn't been incinerated. 

"I suppose we should try to unbury the Question . . ." The Captain stirred the mess with a toe. 

"I know where _I'd_ start looking." Beetle aimed a pointed glance at the missing wall. 

"Oh no . . . you think he made it out?" 

_"We_ got caught by surprise; _he_ was expecting it. Wonder exactly what was in that thing," he added in a murmur. "It packed quite a punch . . ." 

_"I'm_ going to pack quite a punch when I catch him," Captain Atom growled, flying out the ragged hole marring the wall. Blue Beetle waited just long enough to make sure that Captain Atom was distracting the security systems before following. 

  


  



	9. Chapter 8: Running the Gauntlet

  


_**Chapter Eight**_

* * *

Captain Atom lit down the hall with only a faint smell of smoke leading him through the labyrinth of corridors. The halls were as well-armed as the teleport room, judging from the strange, vaguely menacing mechanisms activating with metallic clicks, sliding from behind previously concealing wall panels. At first he flew in a weaving pattern to avoid their bolts, but after one of the lasers hit him and simply bounced of his skin, he ignored them completely, as well as the computer system's polite requests for him to stop and put his hands in the air. 

"Atom." 

Nathaniel turned his head to find the Blue Beetle trotting behind him, skillfully dodging the blasts of any weapons that happened to swivel in his direction. 

"You really shouldn't do that," Beetle continued when he saw that he had Captain Atom's attention. 

"Do what?" 

"That. Letting them hit you." 

"Why not? They can't hurt m--UMPH!" He jerked backwards as a robotic tentacle shot out of the wall and wrapped itself around his head. 

_"That's_ why not," Blue Beetle said as a similar tentacle lashed out and caught him by the leg. 

"Resistance persists," came the ever-so-polite voice over the comm system. "Upgrading program." 

Captain Atom gripped the tentacle ensnaring him and summoned a burst of quantum power to blast it off before freeing Blue Beetle in a similar fashion. 

"He went this way. You can see the scorch marks where the lasers were shooting at him, see?" The Blue Beetle pointed at the steel floor, as casually as if he hadn't just been pulled from a death trap. 

"I'm more concerned with the lasers shooting at _us,"_ Captain Atom said as he blasted another set of tentacles into oblivion. 

"So we'll multi-task. You shoot, I'll track." Blue Beetle headed down the hall. "Keep moving . . . They'll change tactics again once the figure out that those things won't hold you. Probably break out the nerve gas . . ." 

"Wonderful," Nathaniel muttered, flying backwards as he carpeted their retreat with a heavy cover fire of plasma bolts. He felt a vague sense of guilt over causing so much property damage, but better the Watchtower than _him_ . . . and they _did_ need to find the Question. 

They didn't have to search long. It had barely been three minutes when they turned down a narrow corridor and almost ran into their quarry. The Question was huddled in a corner of a crooked, laser-burned hallway, half-engulfed in his trenchcoat. (He must have retrieved it before darting out of the teleportation room.) He shifted to face Captain Atom and Blue Beetle as they paused to assess the situation. 

"Troubles, Question?" Captain Atom asked, hoping to distract him as Blue Beetle slowly edged towards the vigilante, poised and ready for action. "Not enjoying your stay? Don't worry, the JLA will be glad to make it up to you with free lodging . . . for five to ten years." (God help him, he was actually _bantering_. This was what happened to a guy when he was suddenly able to crush cars and forced to fly around pantless. Heck, breaking into the Watchtower could be legal for all he knew; it wasn't like it was in the juristriction of any country, being on the moon and all . . . ) 

"Amusing, Captain. Ha. Ha. Defenses are a _bit_ more than estimated . . . " The Question didn't move, but suddenly he seemed tensed, coiled, ready to erupt into a flurry of kicks. "Wouldn't advise getting any closer, Blue Beetle," he said in a dangerous tone. 

"What's the matter, Question? Scared?" Beetle asked breezily, doing a flip that landed him just outside range of the Question's fists. "Should've thought about that before you broke into the Watcht--" 

A silver laser array laced with glowing green circuitry whipped down from the ceiling with a faint whir. Parts of it were crumpled and sparking, faintly lighting the blast-darkened walls of the hallway beyond the corner. Instead of the the evenly modulated yellow light that they had encountered before, _this_ laser powered up with an erratic rattle an instant before firing a concentrated stream of eye-achingly bright blue light. The Question swirled in a low kick that knocked Beetle off his feet as the laser shrieked through the space where his head had been. Beetle rolled to his feet, instinctively turning to see what was attacking him, but the Question quickly gripped his shoulder and pulled him backwards into the corner. 

"Should've listened," he commented as another electric blue bolt scarred the floor. 

"I take it that thing isn't set to stun?" Beetle asked, shaking his head to rid himself of the afterimage that the bright light had temporarily burnt into his retinas. 

"Not likely." Captain Atom grimaced as he crouched down to examine sizzling and bubbling of the metal floor where the weapon had hit it. As he reached down to examine the molten metal more closely, another laserbolt shot down. There was a faint sound of sheering metal as it grazed his wrist, and Nate felt a jolt of shock as he realized that it had actually scored the silvery metal surrounding his hand. He jerked back, gripping his wrist as his eyes flitted anxiously towards the two non-powered humans. If the laser thingie could hurt _him_ . . . 

Perhaps seeing the Captain's concern, the Question meaningfully tapped the corner. "Blind spot." 

"Lucky for you," Captain Atom said. From his current position, he was also shielded from the weapon, but reaching the Question and Beetle--or vice versa--would mean passing in front of the gap between the corners of the jog in the hallway, within range of the mounted defense mechanism. 

"Why is this one so . . . lethal?" Captain Atom wondered out loud. 

"Might have jostled it a little with the last grenade," the Question admitted. "Unintentional." 

"'Jostled'. I like that." Blue Beetle looked as though he was considering taking a peek around the corner. Nate fervently hoped he would think better of it. "So now what? We just hang out until the JLA arrives?" 

"They still require someone to be on Monitor Duty 24/7, right? I could go find them and bring them back here . . . " 

"You wouldn't even need to bring them back here, just get them to shut down the computer system--ohhhhh no." Blue Beetle slapped his head. "Never mind, that's not gonna work. The whole defense grid is networked. If this one's doing the wannabee-Death-Star thing, we'll probably find the same thing all over the Watchtower." 

"Quite knowledgeable about the security system for someone so reluctant to break in, Blue Beetle . . ." 

"Look, it's common sense. If you knew more about computers and less about breaking kneecaps, you'd know this sort of thing too. Besides, I snuck a look at the programming protocols when . . ." Blue Beetle trailed away, tilting his head thoughtfully. "I think I have a plan," he resumed after a few minutes. 

"You _think?"_ Captain Atom asked with severe misgivings. Blue Beetle's most infamous plan, back in the days of Justice League International, had involved "borrowing" the JLI's bank account to fund a hotel-casino. Granted, that had been a long time ago, but given that his "brilliant idea" had practically bankrupted the Justice League, it was the kind of thing you didn't forget right away. "What is this great plan?" 

"Got a map of the Watchtower, Question?" 

The Question looked at Blue Beetle, unmoving. 

"Come on, I know you have one." 

The Question slowly drew a folded piece of stiff, brown paper from his left pocket and handed it over to Beetle with obvious reluctance. For his part, Blue Beetle blinked in surprise behind this goggles; the thick, rough paper looked like it had once been part of a grocery back. As he unfolded it, the word "Safeway" was revealed, confirming his suspicions. 

He turned the makeshift paper over and discovered what appeared to be an intricate blueprint of sorts sketched on the other side in pencil. The neat, precise lines carefully laid out to represent rooms and corridors were sharply contrasted by the haphazard notations scribbled seemingly at random across the paper. The words were too cramped to read, but they had been written with great passion, or at least great force; in more than one place Blue Beetle spotted the telltale graphite smudge that told of an abused pencil snapping under undue pressure. 

Beetle doubted the Question's footnotes made any sort of sense anyway; mostly he just wished the notes--and the arrows scrawled onto the paper, pointing to one corridor or another--didn't make the map so difficult to read. He turned the paper ninety degrees once, then once again, trying to figure out where they were right now in relation to the makeshift map. 

"Okay. Got it. We're _here,"_ he stabbed a blue-gloved finger at the paper, "and we need to get over _here."_

"Get _where?"_ Captain Atom demanded. He was still standing across the hall from the other two, but he was hovering as high as he could, arching his neck as he tried to get a peek at whatever Beetle was looking at. 

"It's a--" As Beetle looked up, his eyes widened and his sentence trailed away. "Oh crap." 

Never a good sign, Captain Atom reflected, especially since the Blue Beetle was looking at _him._ Or to be more precise, _behind_ him. He turned in mid-air and was not really surprised to find something that resembled a two foot tall mechanical spider poised at his feet. 

With a whirr, a red scope with crosshairs etched into it telescoped out of the gleaming black robot's "head" and panels on its back slid smoothly open to reveal . . . lasers. 

Captain Atom was getting pretty damn _sick_ of lasers. He gathered a fistful of nuclear energy from the invisible but ever-present quantum field and reduced the robot to a pile of melted metal. 

"Spider sense tingling," Blue Beetle commented. Captain Atom gave him an confused look, but Beetle simply continued, "So anyway--_CRAP!"_

"Oh, for crying out loud," Nate said, throwing his hands in the air. "What is . . . it . . . now?" He trailed away as he turned and discovered . . . another robotic spider. And another. And another. From his aerial vantagepoint, he could see dozens of them streaming down the hallway, skittering out of the corridors they had just come through, running with that odd, eight-legged gait. Nate spun aside just in time to avoid being riddled with laserfire. Oh God . . . the _Arachnophobia_ franchise had _nothing_ on this. 

"Um. Secondary defense systems. Suggest a strategic retreat." 

"Translation: let's get the hell out of Dodge. Okay, you've convinced me. Cap can be our taxi--" 

"Oh _joy,"_ Nate muttered as he flew across the hall, dodging a blast of blue laserfire. 

"You fly, I'll navigate. Just start down that hall--hey, you can carry both of us without getting a hernia or something, right?" 

"Yeah, yeah . . ." The spider-bots came pouring around the corner just as Captain Atom tucked the Question under one arm, grabbed Blue Beetle with the other, and rocketed away, barely dodging the weapon that the Question had damaged earlier as they shot down the hall. Of course, their presence caused yet more lasers to lower from the ceiling. Captain Atom was sure he was going to have nightmares about lasers for weeks . . . 

"Watch the hand," the Question growled, obviously unhappy with the flying arrangements. 

"Stop _squirming,"_ Nate snapped in reply, trying to get a solid grip on the Question and dodge fire from newly awakened defense systems at the same time. The battered trenchcoat kept trying to slide out from under the Captain's slick metallic fingers--the same problem that had allowed the Question to slip away from him to begin with. "I swear I'm going to drop you if you don't--" 

"Turn left," interrupted the Blue Beetle, who had the unenviable task of simultaneously reading a map drawn by a madman and keeping an eye on where they actual were in _relation_ to said map, all while watching the world zip by at who knew how many miles per hour. 

Nate obligingly turned left. 

"Now take a right . . . no, no, the _next_ right . . . straight down this hall . . ." There was a short but significant pause, filled only by the quiet but crescendoing clatter of hundreds of metallic legs behind them. "Ah . . . Cap? They're gaining." 

_"Great."_

"But we're almost there," Beetle added, consulting the map again. "Take the next two rights, then hang a left and get ready to stop." 

"Stop?" demanded the Question, nearly losing his hat as Captain Atom shot around the first corner. "Insanity." 

"Pot kettle black," Beetle retorted, then said, "There! THERE! Stop!" 

Captain Atom pulled to a sudden stop, completely losing his grip on the Question's trenchcoat as he did so. The vigilante's momentum carried him forward and he slammed into the wall. The Question grumbled as he pushed himself to his feet, but Captain Atom and Blue Beetle ignored him. 

"This is it." Blue Beetle tapped a set of sliding metal doors which were currently tightly sealed. 

"What's in there?" Captain Atom asked as he ran a finger along the crack separating the two doors. "The control center? The power core?" 

"Atom, we have _seconds_ before the defenses in the hall activate! This is NOT the time for a roundtable discussion! _Get us in!"_

"Visitors coming," the Question added as the skittering of the spider-bots echoed down the hall. 

"Right. Here goes." Captain Atom watched the steel gather around his fingers like wrinkling cloth as he dug his hands into the metal doors and slowly pulled, pulled them apart. He could feel the hydraulics resisting him, ready to automatically snap the door shut if he let go . . . 

"Okay, that's far enough." Blue Beetle ducked around the Captain and slipped into the darkness. The Question paused only a second before following. Captain Atom stared after them in amazement. They were just . . . waltzing into an unexplored, darkened room without taking any precautions . . . ? Then again . . . He eyed the swarm of robotic spiders swarming around the corner. When he turned back towards the doorway, he found two bug-like eyes catching a sliver of light ahead of him in the blackness. 

"Earth to Captain Atom. Are you coming in or what?" 

"Erm . . . sure . . ." He slid through the gap. As he had anticipated, the doors hissed shut the moment he let go of them, leaving him in total, blinding darkness. "Where are we? I can't see a thing . . ." 

With a brief scuffing sound the room flared into view, centered around the match gripped in the Question's gloved hand. The dim, flickering light left Nathaniel with an impression of a medium room holding row upon row of neatly ordered . . . tools? weapons? . . . standing sentinel in custom designed stands. There were boxes too, large ones stacked in the corners and smallers ones lining the shelves on the walls. 

"What is this? The armory?" 

"Not exactly, although depending on your definition . . ." Captain Atom looked around to find where Beetle's voice was coming from and finally spotted him in the corner, detaching a panel from the wall. 

"Huh." The shadows deepened in the hollows of the Question's featureless face. "Bugs still at it. Outside," he added as Blue Beetle looked at him, ready to be offended. 

All three paused, listening to the sound of thin metal legs scraping at the steel door. 

"Can they force their way in?" Captain Atom wondered as the Question shook out the match, which was threatening to burn his fingers, and lit another. 

"I have an idea; let's not find out. Can I have some light over here . . . ?" 

Curious, Captain Atom moved to the corner and floated up a few inches to peer over the Question's shoulder. Blue Beetle was sitting on the ground, leaning over something that vaguely resembled a handheld computer with a screen about six inches across. 

"It's an emergency communicator," Beetle explained as he popped the faceplate off the device. "I put through a general distress call, but no one's picked it up. I might be able to use it to get into the computer system, though . . ." 

"Intriguing . . . but viable?" the Question said, tilting his head. 

"We'll find out soon enough . . ." He bent over the communicator, intent on his work. 

"Running out of matches," the Question muttered, checking his pockets for more. 

"Never mind about them." Nate siphoned some energy from the surrounding quantum field . . . not enough for an atomic blast, but just enough to make his hands glow with ripples of red and yellow light. 

"Could have done that before," the Question huffed, shaking out his last match. 

"I didn't think of it. Sue me," the Captain shrugged. "Hey Beetle, how's it going?" 

"Mmmmm . . . ?" Beetle didn't look up. "I can see the data flow, but I haven't figured out how to manipulate it yet . . ." 

"I wonder where the JLA is," Captain Atom said. 

He couldn't tell if Blue Beetle was trying for sarcasm or not when he replied, "Hey, it's the Justice League. I'm sure they have everything under control." 

* * *

Hawkgirl had lost control of the situation quite a while ago and had never quite regained it. She was currently wishing she'd joined the Titans instead of the JLA. A thousand thousand alarms were screaming at her, warning lights were sending flickering strobes of red light over the screens that lined literally every part of the circular wall, and the manual to the Monitor Womb was _not_ helping. 

"'Troubleshooting,'" she muttered as she hunched over Volume VII of the manual. "'GENERAL ALARM: We want your JLA experience to be productive and _safe!_ The Watchtower is protected by twenty-five layers of independent, progressively detailed security systems designed to automatically compensate for--' Okay, let's cut past the feel-good crap. 'Automated self-repairing systems based on nanotechnology in case of attack or accidental rupture', blah blah blah . . . 'The long-range scanning computers will emit one sharp beep in the case of an alien invasion, two if the moon is losing its orbit, three if a giant starfish is attacking Earth' . . . How long _is_ this list??" She flipped a few pages. "'Two sharp beeps, one squeal, and a sort of blarghy noise if someone _forgets to put in the tape to record Plastic Man's shows??'"_

Hawkgirl slammed the manual shut. She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. But mostly she wanted to hit something really really hard with her mace. 

Not for the first time, she found herself questioning the wisdom of her teammates in assigning her to monitor duty. "'It'll be _fine,_ Hawkgirl. Nothing to _worry_ about, Hawkgirl. They only need us for flood control for two hours MAX, Hawkgirl. What could POSSIBLY happen?' HA!" She booted the manual across the room, sending it bouncing off the monitor that switched to Cartoon Network every Friday at 7:00 PM, no matter how many times they tried to reprogram it. (The late Green Lantern of Earth was likely to blame.) 

Right now, Hawkgirl would've been content--no, HAPPY--with cartoons as opposed to the shrieking sirens and the epilepsy-inducing flickering of masses of red and blue lights. She growled as she approached the control chair hovering high in the center of the room. The earthbound members of the JLA could summon the chair electronically, but of course Hawkgirl didn't need to, having mechanical wings. 

"One more try . . ." She sucked in a deep breath as she regarded the largest monitor in front of her. "Okay . . . so . . . some kind of disturbance. Doesn't say what, but maybe if I click here . . . no, that's giving me schematics of the Watchtower. How about _here_ . . . Noooo, I DON'T want to install the latest version of ICQ, you piece of crap! Okay, if I click here and drag this icon over to . . ." Pause. "Aaaaaand the screen goes dead. _Great."_

She lost her temper and smacked the side of the computer. It flickered to life, but with a slight skittering fuzziness around the edge of the screen that suggested that Hawkgirl had made a lasting impression on some of the hardware. 

"Do you wish to upgrade the defense protocols?" a computerized voice asked in pleasant, modulated tones. 

"Sure, okay," Hawkgirl said. What could it hurt? 

The computer hummed for a second, then displayed a rotating wireframe of what appeared to be a rather well-armed, hulking robot. It had a hunched posture and massive arms, making it vaguely resemble a robotic ape . . . if an ape had guns and what looked to be missile launchers strapped all over its body. "Deploying Internal Defense Unit #32, clearance level 9," the computer announced. "Mission: Seek hostiles. Incapacitate or destroy." 

Hawkgirl thought about protesting the "destroy" part, but decided not to. Whatever was out there deserved what they got for giving her a migraine. It was probably just some androids sent by Professor Ivo or T.O. Morrow or somebody anyway. Hawkgirl really hated androids. 

"Tracking . . . tracking . . ." the computer murmured as the green wireframe image of the robot walked in place on the screen, apprently mimicking the actions of the _real_ thing. "Spider-Drones blocking access . . . Recalling . . . Path cleared. Infrared scanners activated; heat signatures detected . . . pursuing . . ." The wireframe image drew its arms back, rapidly punching out three times before both the image and the computer generating it paused. "Interferance . . . detected . . . detected . . . de-t-t-tectkcht . . ." 

The computerized voice slurred and died . . . along with the rest of the computer systems, monitors, and the lights. 

"Oh my God," Hawkgirl said. _"I broke the Watchtower!"_ She covered her masked face with her hands. "This isn't happening. This isn't happening. Please God, no." 

The lights came on and she was surrounded by the peaceful hum of over thirty computers booting up. 

She peeked through her fingers in surprise, sitting stock still in shock. "THANK YOU!!" she told the ceiling, face upturned. "Now . . . about that security breach . . ." 

But the computers didn't show any record of a security breach. Hawkgirl reviewed the security tapes, just in case, but saw nothing more exciting than miles of blank, lifeless corridor. As far as the Watchtower was concerned, there was no problem at all. 

Hawkgirl shrugged. Computer gremlins. A more advanced computer just gave them more to play with. She had half-suspected that was the problem anyway. 

After all, who would actually risk breaking into the Watchtower? 

You'd have to be crazy. 

  



	10. Chapter 9: No Trust in the Morrow

  


_**Chapter Nine**_

* * *

"Hmm . . ." The Question fingered the irregular, convex bulges now marring the reinforced steel door. "Cutting it a little close, Blue Beetle." 

"I didn't see you doing anything better," Beetle returned, setting the jury-rigged communicator aside as he listened to the metallic footsteps now retreating down the hall. 

"That was . . ." Captain Atom took a breath. ". . . interesting. How'd you stop it?" 

"I hacked into the main system and erased us." Seeing Captain Atom's blank expression, Blue Beetle added, "I deleted all the security tapes and logs that recorded our presence and replaced them with previously recorded information that showed normal activity. A simple copy and paste operation, actually . . ." 

"Where are we, anyway?" 

"Hang on . . ." Beetle fiddled with the communicator and after a second the overhead lights flared to life. "See for yourself." 

Captain Atom turned in a slow circle. The racks that he had observed earlier, in half-darkness, all held . . . "Mops? Brooms? Is . . . is that a _vacuum cleaner?"_

"Welcome to one of the Watchtower's many broom closets," Beetle said. "The only place I could think of without a security system." 

"We're in an oversized _closet?"_ Captain Atom asked incredulously. "How'd you even _know_ about this place?" 

"Ah . . . well . . ." Beetle took up a slightly defensive tone. "I got a look at it a while ago when I was . . . helping out the JLA." 

Captain Atom looked at him. "Helping them _how?"_

"Helping them . . . clean," Blue Beetle said, sounding somewhat irritated, then added, "It was Booster's _fault."_

Nate put two and two together. "They put you on probation, didn't they? How did you manage _that?_ Neither of you are even members of the Justice League any more!" 

"We're still _reserve_ members, thank you very much!" 

"But what did you actually do?" 

"Oh, it was this whole teleporter-courier service thing. Blue and Gold Delivery Service . . . 'When it absolutely, positively has to be there in six seconds.'" 

"So you ripped off the JLA's teleporter technology and used it for a private delivery system," Captain Atom translated. "Until the JLA dragged you in by your ear." 

"It was _Booster's_ fault!" 

Nate raised an eyebrow. _"Booster_ was the one who hijacked the JLA's technology? _Booster_ was the one who reprogrammed the teleporter software?" 

"Booster," Blue Beetle said with dignity, "was the one who got _caught."_

"Uh . . . huh." Captain Atom decided not to press the point. "So now I guess it's just a matter of waiting," he changed the subject. 

"Waiting?" 

"For the JLA." 

"Mm-hm. Don't know why they didn't notice us; we must have set off a dozen alarms . . ." 

"Maybe," the Question said in his soft, uneven voice, "they did notice." 

Both Captain Atom and Blue Beetle turned towards the overturned box on which he was perched. 

"What do you mean 'maybe they noticed'?" Blue Beetle demanded. "We could have been _killed_ a dozen times over!" 

"Yes." 

"That's ridiculous," Captain Atom said after he'd digested the inference. 

"Of course it is." Blue Beetle glared at the Question. When his business went bankrupt, the League had tided him over. When Doomsday knocked him into a coma, the League had cared for him. It had been his home for a long, long time. "Why are you here, Question? Trying to conquer the world like every other megalomaniac?" 

The Question looked towards Beetle with a slight crease above his eyesockets suggesting a frown. "I've seen too much of the world," the Question said, "to want it." 

"What DO you want, then?" Captain Atom repeated Beetle's question. 

"To save the world. Naturally." 

"From . . . ?" 

"The JLA," he said as though it should be self-evident. 

"I think you're confused," Captain Atom said, in a calm voice obviously meant to humor the Question. "Look, if we just walk out the door and go to the monitor womb, I'm sure the Justice League will be glad to hear your suggestions for--" 

"Let's wait until I get the automated defenses permanently shut down before we go anywhere, okay?" Blue Beetle interrupted. "Right now they're only dormant because I've deleted our existence, so to speak. We step under the video cameras and this whole mess starts again. As for _you,"_ he gave the Question a look from behind his goggles, _"great_ plan. Yeah, let's try to take out the JLA, the team that saves the world once a month." 

"Nothing wrong with stopping alien invasions and such," the Question said, holding up a hand in acknowledgement of Beetle's point. "But it's a matter of _trust."_

"You don't trust the JLA?" Beetle cocked an eyebrow. 

"You do?" 

"Of course I do." Honestly, the man really _was_ insane. "Maybe I'm just a reserve member these days, but I'm still a Leaguer. The League is . . ." Beetle twirled the paperclip he'd used to reprogram the communicator. "It's like family. A _dysfunctional_ family, granted, but--" 

_"Your_ League was like family, Blue Beetle," the Question said, crossing his arms. "The JLI. Justice League International. But who is left from it? On _active_ duty," he added as Beetle opened his mouth. "No one. All dead or disbanded." 

"So what? Sure, the roster's changed again but it's still the Justice League . . ." 

"Is it?" 

"What do you mean by that?" asked Captain Atom, who had been standing with his arms crossed, glancing between the two. 

"The new members were all chosen," the Question observed, "by Batman." 

"Well, why not?" Beetle asked. Batman had led "his" League, as the Question put it, for several months. And a very effective leader he'd been, too. No sense of humor, unfortunately, and he'd had both Booster and Beetle on probation almost permanently (which had been Booster's fault . . . mostly), but in a crisis Bats always got the job done. "Why not Batman?" 

Unexpectedly, the silver-skinned captain cleared his throat. "Well, Batman isn't exactly the most . . . _well-balanced_ person, is he? I mean," he added, "he _is_ a vigilante." 

Blue Beetle looked at him coldly. _"I'm_ a vigilante." 

"But you're not exactly Batman, are you? And by that I mean," he added hastily as Beetle stared at him expressionlessly, "that you don't stay in the shadows as much. You're not an urban legend. People know who you are." 

_"Some_ people know me better than others, apparently," Beetle said, his eyes narrowed and his goggles gleaming under the fluorescent lights. "And I hate to break it to you, but we're _all_ vigilantes. Nobody handed Superman or the Flash--any of the Flashes--or Green Arrow a badge or a license, but I've never heard any of the people they saved complain about it. In fact, I can't think of any superheroes who _are_ government approved . . ." He paused a beat. "Except _you,_ of course, Captain." 

"The Flash--the youngest Flash, the most recent one--worked for the IRS for a bit, actually," Captain Atom said in a stiff voice. "And all I was trying to say was that Batman always seemed very . . . _driven._ Obsessed. He isn't--wasn't--normal." 

"Says the man encased in stainless steel." 

"That's not what I meant and you know it." 

"Oh, I _do,_ do I? So what would you suggest, oh Silver Savior? You want the old JLA to pop up and second-guess the Bat's choices? Well, I hate to burst your bubble, but Wonder Woman, Superman, and the rest are all _dead_--" 

"But the JLA survives," the Question said softly. 

"The JLA is dead, long live the JLA," Blue Beetle shrugged. 

"Heard that phrase before. An observation that the institution outlives the individual . . . " 

"No--it's an observation that the individual _needs_ the institution," Captain Atom frowned. 

"Like you need the Army, Captain?" 

"Air Force; mostly I work with the Air Force. No, not quite the same thing." He sounded depressed. "But the world does need the Justice League." 

Blue Beetle nodded authoritatively. "Right. Exactly." 

"Hn." 

"Batman still wouldn't be the one I'd let choose the candidates," Captain Atom continued, "but done is done, and at least we _have_ a League again. And the good roster seems good enough." 

"Is it?" 

"'Is it?' 'Do you?' 'Wait, maybe the JLA let the Watchtower try to fry us down to our atoms on PURPOSE!'" Beetle mimicked. "You have problems, you know that?" 

"I know. Oh, I know." The Question was holding that flat, rectangular package again, absent-mindedly flexing it in his hands just enough so that the light shifted on the slick black garbage bag wrapped around it. 

The room lapsed into an uncomfortable silence. 

"You know Green Arrow?" the Question asked at last. "The archer." 

"The first one, Ollie? I met him a couple times, but I wouldn't say I _know_ him . . ." Captain Atom said cautiously. 

"Impression?" 

"Ah . . ." Captain Atom's brow furrowed. "Let's see . . . the first time I met him was when we were planning an offensive during that big alien invasion a couple years back. He, um, called me a nickel-plated fascist. And a government stooge. I got the impression he was like that with everyone, though." But he looked discomfited. 

"A high-strung man. Passionate. Dangerous. Dead." 

"Ah . . . excuse me?" Blue Beetle raised an eyebrow. "He sure didn't look dead at that press conference." 

"Dead," the Question repeated. "Came back to life." 

"Oh . . . that. That was months ago. Get with the times, Question." 

The Question tilted his head towards the blue-clad superhero who so casually disregarded death. "Not exactly a common occurrence, Blue Beetle." 

"Tell it to Superman. At least Benjamin Franklin was half right; _taxes_ are still a certainty." 

"Resurrection . . . not so common for non-metas," the Question pointed out. (Humans with the meta-gene had the potential to develop powers when exposed to certain stimuli. Metahumans got hit by lightning and became super-fast or gained the attributes of gods; non-metahumans got hit by lightning and died.) "Green Arrow was a man with a bow. Hardly guarantees a two-way ticket." 

"So he's the exception that proves the rule," Beetle said. "The JLA--the Big Seven JLA--met him and gave him their stamp of approval. What more do you want?" 

"Proof that he is who he says, maybe?" The Hub City vigilante crossed his arms and somehow gave the impression that he was raising one eyebrow behind his mask. 

_"The JLA already did that,"_ Blue Beetle said in a slow, clear voice, the way people do when they're trying to explain something very simple to someone who isn't that bright. 

"Hrm." The Question leaned back in his trenchcoat. "I don't trust dead men." 

"Well, yay for you," Blue Beetle said. He suddenly remembered something Black Canary had once told him. "Didn't you used to team up with Green Arrow? Did _you_ try to meet him and find out if he's really Ollie?" 

"We fought together a few times," he said as though he were reluctant to admit it. "But Oliver was too soft, in the end. Didn't realize how deep the shadows lie. Even after Coast City." 

Something about the way the Question hissed the last words sent a shiver down Beetle's spine. He started casting around for a way to change the subject. "What about you, Cap?" he asked lightly. "Ever had your ticket punched?" 

He didn't really expect a meaningful response to his enquiry, but Captain Atom shifted and looked embarrassed. "Once," he said at last. "Only for a half hour." 

Beetle raised a critical eyebrow, then decided that Atom was really too serious to joke about something like that. Or much of anything, for that matter. "So what's the afterlife like?" he asked, curious in spite himself. 

"I don't really remember much of it." The government superhero looked thoughtful. "I think I grew a beard." And then, not noticing Blue Beetle's disbelieving stare, he added in a mutter, "Pants. Death came for me and I _still_ didn't have pants." 

That, Blue Beetle thought, was a conversation killer if he ever heard one. The room lapsed into silence again. 

Captain Atom brooded over his near-death experience for a few minutes before turning to the Question. "Why all this concern over Green Arrow? Even if he really is an imposter he is, like you said, just a man with a bow. He'd be easy to stop." 

"He's part of the League now. Batman's League. With access to the Watchtower. With access to weapons. With access to files. This doesn't concern you?" When Captain Atom didn't answer right away, he added, "Batman knew how to kill you, Captain." 

Captain Atom stared at him with his pupilless yellow eyes. "What?" 

"Batman," the Question repeated in his calm, uneven voice, "knew how to kill you. Not the word he would use, of course. 'Incapacitate', no doubt. But the same gist. If he knew how to stop Superman and Wonder Woman, he knew how to stop you. Permanently, if needed." 

Nate shifted uncomfortably. "If you're talking about the JLA's trouble with . . . protocols . . . last July--" 

"Don't usually pay much notice to that sort of thing," the Question said, "but it caught the attention. The Flash caught in a fit of hypersonic epilepsy. The Martian's skin peeling as it caught fire. Wonder Woman hallucinating, heart overstimulated. Green Lantern blinded. Plastic Man broken. Aquaman hydrophobic. And Superman . . ." The vigilante paused. "The Dark Knight was handy with his kryptonite compounds, certainly. Batman triumphant." 

"It was my understanding," Captain Atom said slowly, "that it was actually the eco-terrorist Ra's al Ghul who temporarily took down the JLA." 

"The malice was Ra's al Ghul's, but the plans, the resources . . . all the Bat's." 

"Yeah, but stolen from him by Ra's," Beetle pointed out. 

"Must have been gratifying for him to see that his theories were sound." 

"More gratifying than waking up one day and discovering that we have another Hal-Jordan-turned-Parallax on our hands and no way to stop him!" 

"It's a moot point, isn't it?" Captain Atom said, wishing once again that he were still in bed, buried under a warm cascade of blankets. "Batman is dead." 

"Batman is dead." The Question agreed, absently kicking his heel against the box he was sitting on. "But. 'The JLA is dead, long live the JLA.' And _who_ chose the new Justice League?" He waited for an answer and when none came he continued, "If the Batman had protocols for his JLA, he had them for you, Captain. And for Power Girl. And for Black Canary. Doctor Fate. Captain Marvel. Sentinel. Probably non-metas too--Wildcat, Blue Beetle, myself . . ." 

Captain Atom heard Beetle mutter, "I hope he _started_ with you," but the comment was half-hearted. 

"The question is not whether you trusted Batman," the faceless man said. "But whether you trust plans detailing your weaknesses in the hands of someone who may or may not be Green Arrow." 

"Even if it _isn't_ Ollie, the rest of the JLA is there to keep an eye on him," Blue Beetle protested. 

"Ah. And who is 'the rest of the JLA'? Faith--a complete unknown. Jason Blood--a man constantly fighting his inner demon. Firestorm--" 

"Leave Ronnie out of this; he's a good kid," Captain Atom said sharply. 

"Firestorm is one of the most down-to-earth superheroes I know," Beetle agreed. "I'm sorry, but I just can't picture him waking up one day and saying, 'Hey, that Metamorpho guy is stealing my thunder with his element-transmuting powers! It's time I did something about it!'" 

"Could you picture it more easily," the Question asked, "if he were drunk?" 

Unbidden, Nate found himself remembering Firestorm screaming through the sky at breakneck speed, slowed only by the weaving of his flight, before crashing, skidding into a hillside. He had hurried over to see what was wrong with the flame-headed young hero. Firestorm had stared up at him, his costume in tatters and his face bruised and bloodied from his landing. But the thing that Nate remembered most clearly was the sour smell of alcohol on Firestorm's breath as he whispered, "I need help . . ." 

"Firestorm had some . . . problems . . . but he got help," Beetle said quietly, halfway echoing Captain Atom's thoughts. 

"When Batman's probe tracked him down to invite him to the Watchtower, he was on his college campus," the Question said. "At a kegger." 

"He was--? I don't believe it," Captain Atom said. "No, I can't accept that." 

"Accept what you want. What about Major Disaster? Not just a member of the former Injustice League, but its leader--" 

"Well, no argument _there._ That guy is a menace," Blue Beetle said. "But not a menace the way Brainiac or Despero is a menace. Ohhhh no, it's worse than _that._ He screws up everyone around him whether he's trying to or not. Major Disaster is right; I've NEVER seen anyone with a more appropriate codename. Well . . . maybe Impulse . . ." he said as an aside. 

Privately, Captain Atom thought that Beetle was still feeling wrathful towards Major Disaster for his part in bankrupting one of Blue and Gold's get rich quick schemes. It had happened years ago, of course, but time could only do so much to lessen the sting of losing millions upon millions of dollars. Still and all . . . "The man is a known criminal," Captain Atom agreed. "Not only did Justice League International fight him, but he was wreaking havoc in Gotham just a couple years ago--" 

"In a rare display of competence," Beetle said. "And _that_ is the worst part. Even if he's on the level these days--and let me say that I am _un_convinced--he's so hopelessly inept that he's a hazard to be around. Remember when he and his buddies wanted to go straight and join the JLI? They managed to screw up a mission that consisted of sitting around in a bunker in Antarctica! _Antarctica!"_ he repeated incredulously. "I mean, how is that even possible??" 

"Yeah, I don't know," Captain Atom said. 

"Hm. The question is . . . do you trust him with your lives?" 

Blue Beetle crossed his arms and frowned at the floor while Captain Atom looked at the figure soaking up the shadows in the folds of his trenchcoat. 

"More important: Do you trust him with the fate of the world?" 

After a moment's pause, Captain Atom said, "Maybe--" just as Blue Beetle started, "Well--" They both stopped. 

Beetle motioned for Captain Atom to speak first, so the silver-skinned hero cleared his throat. "Maybe . . . we should talk this out a little more," he said. Blue Beetle's expression was carefully neutral, but he nodded in concession. 

"No objection," the Question agreed without moving, without giving a sign that he cared one way or another. 

But Nate had the strangest feeling he was being confronted with a faceless smile. 

  



	11. Chapter 10: Downtime

  


_**Chapter Ten**_

* * *

Nate was still staring uneasily at the Hub City vigilante when the Blue Beetle broke the silence. 

"So . . . how far does this plan of yours go?" asked Beetle, who was now sitting on a large wooden crate of detergent, resting one leg across the other. His voice, like his posture, was casual, but with a hint of tension that suggested that he was not as relaxed as he pretended. 

The Question looked at him. "Meaning?" 

"Meaning . . ." Beetle locked his fingers around his knee as he leaned back. " . . . how exactly--and please note my use of the word exactly, because I'm getting pretty tired of cryptic sentence fragments--did you plan to 'save the world' from the JLA? Because that sounds to me kind of like you had a hostile takeover planned, and in that case my concern would be . . ." His eyes narrowed just a fraction behind his goggles. " . . . that someone might get hurt." 

"Your concern is noted," the Question said, unphased. "But misplaced." 

"How so?" Captain Atom asked, raising an eyebrow. 

The Question tilted his head so that his face was barely visible under his weatherworn hat. Nate was beginning to think he wouldn't answer at all, but he finally said, "No need to disrupt their games unless we need to." 

"Oh? And when did it become 'we' instead of 'you'?" Beetle asked in a voice that was just a touch too light. 

"When you hesitated." In the uncomfortable silence that followed, he added, "You disagree?" 

"Look, I'm not saying you don't necessarily have some valid points, but . . . " Beetle trailed off, frowning as he crossed his arms. 

"Hn." The Question sounded nonplussed. "Maybe best to revisit the matter tomorrow." He had a point; it was well after three AM, after all, but . . . 

"I'm not sleeping here," Captain Atom said firmly. The crates of cleaning solvents stacked against the walls were heavily perfumed with overly-sweet chemical scents, and they were making his throat itch and his eyes burn. 

Nate was just about to suggest that they make a dash for the transporters or try to call the JLA again when Beetle ruined everything by saying, "Well, what about the guest quarters?" 

"The new JLA will be in them, won't they?" Nates said, hoping to kill the idea. 

"No, they'll be in the rooms on the other side of the solar tower, if any of them even sleep here," Blue Beetle said. 

"But we can't get to them because of the security systems," the Captain insisted, a little more forcefully this time. 

"I can temporarily shut down the sensors and have them reboot in twenty-five minutes," said Beetle, who either didn't understand Nate's desire to return home or just didn't care. 

"Good," said the Question. 

Captain Atom thought about arguing the point, but truthfully he was tired, too tired to fight. His eyes kept drifting shut as he followed Beetle, who was trying to stifle some yawns himself, into the hallway. At least this time he didn't have to taxi the other two around as they wandered through the seemingly endless maze of corridors. 

They were using the Question's map again, though the Blue Beetle was navigating. Once in a while Beetle would pause to frown at the map or stare anxiously at a T-junction that shouldn't be there, and Nate would find himself wondering exactly how the abnormalities introduced into his life had become so commonplace that he could be standing silver-clad on the moon, following a man dressed like a bug as he read a map drawn by a madman. 

Just when Captain Atom was beginning to think that Beetle's estimate of twenty-five minutes had been overly optimistic, the three turned a corner and found themselves gazing down at the gleaming Core of the Watchtower far below them. 

As its name suggested, the Core lay at the heart of the Watchtower, forming the base of the great Solar Tower that jutted star-ward from the center of the fortress. It was visible from Earth, they said, with a moderately powerful pair of binoculars. Captain Atom had never looked. But now, with an unexpected front row seat, he found that it was larger than he had thought, with the tower's base (large enough to encompass several city blocks) somehow combining strength and grace as it rose beneath the domed ceiling and its star-framing skylights. Various corridors spiraled around the Core, built into the dome, and all of them had a transparent wall facing the Core, as if to emphasize its importance. 

"That's where the Monitor Womb is," Blue Beetle said, pausing to point at the central structure that focused the vasty room around it. "The Monitor Womb, and the Conference Room's below it, with the round table and all." 

"Sounds like you got a good look at it when you were here before," Captain Atom said. 

"Sure, Steel showed me around. See, that's an advantage I have, Captain Atom . . . people _trust_ me. Well, come on." 

He began walking again and Captain Atom hurried after him. The Question lagged behind a little, his head tilted towards the heart of the Watchtower. Blue Beetle must have noticed, because after a few minutes he casually mentioned that the Core was the most secure and heavily defended area in the Watchtower. "Practically impregnable," he said. 

"Prometheus," the Question replied simply. Blue Beetle frowned and walked faster. 

Captain Atom twisted to get one last look at the Core as Beetle led them into the interior of the Watchtower once more. "The main Teleporter Room," Beetle pointed out as they strode past it. 

"Where we came in?" Captain Atom asked, although the brief glance he caught left him with the impression of a much larger room. 

"No, we came in through the contingency 'porters." 

"They have contingency teleporters?" It seemed like an awfully expensive option. 

"They have a contingency _everything._ It's the nature of the beast." 

"Best to be prepared," the Question agreed. "Almost there?" 

"Yeah, yeah, hold your horses." Beetle paused, peering down a hallway lined with hydraulic doors. 

Captain Atom hated to agree with anyone as erratic as the Question, but . . . "I think I hear a laser warming up," he said worriedly. 

"I _said_ hang on!" The azure superhero hurried over to the closest door and began tapping in an access code, although not before checking over his shoulder to make sure the Question didn't have a clear view of the keypad mounted beside the door. 

The doors soundlessly whooshed open and the three of them crowded into the room. 

Beetle had been right about one thing; the darkened suite was definitely unoccupied. The dimly silhouetted furniture sat with a sterile, symmetrical neatness that defied the untidy uncertainty of human habitation. Light from the quantum field danced on Captain Atom's fingertips as he glanced at a wooden table neatly encircled by slat-backed chairs; apparently they were in the dining room. To the left was a kitchen area, separated from the living room only by strategically placed counters. Three doorways led out of the room, not counting the entrance through which they'd just arrived. 

"It's like an apartment," said Nate, who had pictured something more like a hotel room. 

"Yes," Beetle said shortly as he turned away to flip on the lights. 

Nate frowned at him for a second before quickly glancing around to see what the Question was up to. His stomach lurched whenever the unstable vigilante was out of sight, as he imagined him to be plotting who-knew-what in the dark corners of the Watchtower. Not that the guest quarters _had_ any dark corners, as far as Nate could tell . . . but the principle was the same. He saw the Question disappearing through one of the adjoining doorways and moved to follow him. 

The faceless man was standing in a neatly but simply furnished bedroom, carefully pulling out all the drawers on the nightstand beside the bed. 

"What are you doing?" Captain Atom asked cautiously. 

The Question didn't even look up. "Gauging resources." 

The Captain wasn't sure how to interpret the Question's typically cryptic remark. "Those are all going to be empty, aren't they?" 

"Never know." He pulled out the top and final drawer. "Ah. Ha." The vigilante's gloved hands folded around a case that vaguely resembling a small, soft briefcase. 

"Oh man . . . _please_ don't break that." Having entered the room, Blue Beetle stared at the case the Question held. "I don't want to be paying the JLA for a WayneCorp 3030 LE for the rest of my natural life." 

"A computer?" The Question unzipped the case and pulled out a sleek black laptop. He held it awkwardly, as if he weren't quite sure what to do with it, and didn't protest when Blue Beetle deftly pulled it away from him. 

Beetle carefully righted the machine which the Question had been holding upside-down. "Yep; you've gotta love the Watchtower's equivalent of the Gideon bible, huh?" he said as he flung himself down on the edge of the bed and opened the laptop's screen. "Is there a modem in there?" 

"Some sort of cord?" the Hub City vigilante hazarded, rooting through the case. 

"Don't touch that . . . be careful with . . . oh Lord, just give it here. I'm going to make sure that the 'Tower's defense systems are a) functioning again and b) not going to kill us all in our sleep, and then I am going to _bed._ Which, by the way, I'm claiming for myself, since I think I'm the only person here who hasn't had _any_ sleep tonight. Unless anyone _objects_, of course . . . " He gave Captain Atom a look. 

"Uh . . ." Nate started under Beetle's stare. "No, no, that's fine. I can just sleep . . . er . . . " As he tried to think of exactly where he _could_ bed down for the night, the Question interrupted. 

"Any others?" he asked. 

"Other whats?" Blue Beetle stifled a yawn as his fingers glided over the keyboard. "Computers?" 

"Beds." 

"I don't know." Beetle didn't look up from the laptop. "You can sleep in the coat closet for all I care. If there is a coat closet." 

"Not very considerate, Blue Beetle." 

"I am just _so_ mean, aren't I? Man, where are my manners? Usually I LOVE being blackmailed into breaking into the HQ of the premiere superteam and nearly being zapped to death by lasers and killer robots in the wee hours of the morning. I can't imagine what's gotten into me tonight. Must be a chemical imbalance. Maybe I should switch to skim milk . . . " 

It was not the sort of thing that was usually said to insane, violent vigilantes, especially if you didn't have superpowers, but judging from the shadows under his eyes and the way his head kept nodding, Captain Atom suspected that Blue Beetle was really too tired to care. Not wanting to witness an "incident", the atomic hero wrapped a silvery hand around the collar of the Question's trenchcoat. 

"Let's check out the rest of this place, shall we?" Nate said as he pulled the Question out the door. 

"Hmph." The Question twisted away from him. "Coat closet indeed." 

Personally, Captain Atom wouldn't have minded being in the coat closet if it meant he could get some sleep, but he thought he'd try the other unexplored rooms first. The first one turned out to be a moderately sized TV room, complete with a couch, a couple of easy chairs, and, of course, a big screen TV. Nate thought of people coming all the way to the moon just to watch sitcoms and shook his head. He checked to see if the couch folded out into a bed. It didn't. Of course. 

The next room was a blue-tiled bathroom, but before he had a chance to get a good look at it, he caught sight of the Question slipping into the final doorway out of the corner of his eye. Captain Atom hastily followed, pausing at the threshold. 

"Question?" He flipped the light switch but nothing happened. He couldn't see anything outside the bar of light falling in from the doorway. The floor was bare and he had a vague, half-formed impression of irregular, shadowy shapes leaning against the walls. "Question?" he repeated. As he glanced around, his yellow eyes fell on a faded notice taped to the door. He pulled it off and took a step back into the light to read it. 

It was titled "Requisition for Repairs" in an official block font, and it appeared to be a checklist for assessing the damage done to a previously inhabited room. This particular form had many, many boxes checked off, including carpeting, light fixtures, one mattress . . . all the way down to "one electric toothbrush, Sonicare brand." Near the bottom of the page was printed a rectangular box with "Cause of Damage" printed above it, and this contained one word, written in flowing cursive: "monkie." 

Below it, scribbled in a slightly more haphazard and exuberant hand, was the comment, "Cost of a RfR form? $0.02. Cost of an official JLA ballpoint? $2.00. Cost of the damage caused by the Legion's li'l pet ape? $16,098. Learning that Aquaman can't spell 'monkey'? PRICELESS!!!" 

The sentences below _that_, written in a stiff, vaguely gothic script, read: "Lantern. Since you seem to have FREE TIME ON YOUR HANDS you are assigned to clean-up detail on these quarters, effective NOW. I expect the job done by 0900. (PS: monkeys and apes are from completely separate genealogical families.)" To which the next comment said in tiny, subdued letters, "Yes sir." 

"The JLA is dead," Nate reminded himself, and although he hadn't really known most of them to any degree, he felt a wave of sadness. Such things shouldn't happen. He slowly folded up the paper and tried to put it in his pocket before remembering he didn't have pockets. He repeated a sigh. 

"What's that?" 

Captain Atom started as the Question materialized from the interior darkness. "Nothing important," Nate said, which was certainly the truth. "Did you find anything interesting in there?" He stepped into the room, lighting it with oscillating waves of quantum energy. 

"Empty boxes. Rolled up carpet. Bed." 

"A bed?" Captain Atom exclaimed. "Where--? Oh." He sighed as the Question pointed to a empty bed_frame_ leaning against the wall. Bare springs were _not_ what the Captain had in mind. Aside from the abandoned housewares the Question had mentioned, the only significant features of the room were a closet (not helpful) and an adjoining bathroom (potentially helpful, but not for sleeping in.) In addition, the longer he stood in the once-and-future bedroom, the more he became uncomfortably aware of a subtle but pervasive odor permeating the room. Monkey, Captain Atom thought to himself. Or monkie, depending who you asked. He backed out of the room rather hastily. 

"What's in there?" someone behind him asked. Captain Atom turned to find that the Blue Beetle had traded in his costume for a white terrycloth bathrobe (with the JLA emblem embroidered onto it) and was now brushing his teeth. To Captain Atom's surprise, he had actually taken off his mask. Misinterpreting the government superhero's stare, Beetle--Ted--added, "Technically I already brushed once tonight, but how many people can say they brushed their teeth on the moon?" 

"Oh . . . not many . . . probably . . ." Captain Atom said. And after a short but awkward silence: "Erm . . . about that bathrobe . . ." 

"Complimentary. Like the towels. Didn't you see them in there?" Beetle flicked his toothbrush towards the main bathroom, unintentionally splattering the carpet with toothpaste. 

"Ah." Captain Atom moved across the apartment and into the blue-tiled room, carefully clicking the door shut behind him. Sure enough, in addition to the neat pile of fluffy white towels, handtowels, and washcloths stacked on the wire stand beside the tub, there were also several bathrobes hanging on the back of the door, all of them bearing the JLA insignia. Captain Atom gratefully pulled one off the hook and was about to put it on when he happened to glance towards the sink and catch sight of his face in the mirror. His silver-plated face. He brooded for a minute, a frown creasing his brow. Then--hesitantly--he reached out to the quantum field, flexed his powers in a way that was both instinctive and impossible to describe, and watched his silver skin melt into himself, leaving only a man who was to all appearances perfectly normal, if prematurely white-haired. 

"That's better," Nate told himself as he slipped on the bathrobe, but he felt a growing sense of discomfort as he glanced up to see himself, not his silvery alter-ego, but _himself,_ Nathaniel Adam, standing there on the moon in a JLA bathrobe. Bad enough that circumstance forced all kinds of craziness on him as Captain Atom without getting involved as his _real_ self. Oh God, a _Justice League bathrobe!_

"Well, it's not like I really _need_ it," he muttered, slipping the garment off so it crumpled around his feet. For reasons the government scientists had never been able to satisfactorily explain to him, any clothing he was wearing when he switched to "Captain Atom" disappeared, absorbed into the quantum field, only to reappear when he returned to "normal." In this case, that left him in a perfectly decent pair of boxer shorts. Comfortable, white boxer shorts . . . with a large red "lipstick kiss" embroidered onto the left thigh. Of course, he _had_ to be wearing the pair with the kiss. He closed his eyes in despair, resting his elbows against the sink and his head against his hands. And when he looked up again, he had pulled his metallic skin up to the surface again. Captain Atom was back. 

It would have been nice, he thought wearily as he picked the bathrobe off the floor, to just be himself for once. And the odds of anyone recognizing Nathaniel Adam (or Cameron Scott, as the government had renamed him), an anonymous cog in the military machine, were slim. But he couldn't, just couldn't risk getting himself, his _real_ self, tangled up in this . . . this _mess._ He would just plough through the situation as Captain Atom and then slough off the whole affair as effortlessly as he shed his silver skin. 

Nevertheless, he felt a distinct unease when he emerged into the main living quarters of the apartment and the unmasked Blue Beetle glanced at him and raised an eyebrow before turning back towards whatever currently held his attention--namely watching various sheets and blankets pile up around feet of the Question as he rooted through a set of cupboards built into the wall. "Someone's discovered the linen closet," was Ted Kord's only comment. 

"I hope you don't think you're getting the couch," Captain Atom said, glaring at the faceless vigilante who had, in his opinion, started the whole mess. "Because the couch is _mine."_

"Not interested in the couch." The Question gathered up a large and awkward armful of bedclothes, letting some of them drag behind him as he marched towards the formerly monkey-infested room. 

"There's a bedframe in there but no mattress; you know that, right?" Nate asked, following. 

Blue Beetle, who had paused at the threshold of the door, unsympathetically repeated his comment about the coat closet, then shook his head and left to finally get some sleep. The Question shot a dark look--at least the posture of his body suggested that it would have been a dark look if he had a visible face--after him, then addressed Captain Atom. "No need for a mattress." He carried the mass of sheets into the bathroom adjoining the monkey-room. 

"What are you--? You're going to sleep in the _bathroom?_ In the _bathtub?"_ A note of incredulity crept into Nate's voice as the Question began lining the porcelain basin with fuzzy blankets and paisley sheets. 

"Safe. Lockable door." The Question jiggled the bathroom doorknob meaningfully. 

"So who's out to get you?" Captain Atom asked incredulously. "Me? Beetle? You're paranoid." 

"You're naive," the Question returned. "Good night!" And he shut the door in Nate's face. 

"Well, that was certainly a waste of time," the government hero muttered to himself as he stalked out of the room. "What did you learn tonight, Nate? Well, Nate, I learned that the Question is _completely nuts--_oh WAIT, I knew that already!" He paused in front of the linen closet, scowling. Randomly selecting a blanket, he entered the living room and flopped down on the couch. He turned, trying to get comfortable but only succeeding in tangling the blanket around his metallic legs. Kicking them free, he lay quietly for a bit, with one arm resting beneath his head and the other draped over the edge of the couch so his hand rested on the carpet. Vague apprehensions floated through his mind as his eyes drifted shut. On the moon . . . with a psycho . . . and far, far too many lasers . . . Still, one brief but positive thought fluttered through his head. 

"Free bathrobe," he murmured as sleep claimed him.

  


  



	12. Chapter 11: Surface Tension

_**Chapter Eleven**_

It was the smell of coffee that finally coaxed Ted awake. Slowly prying one eye open, he automatically sought the alarm clock. 11:57 AM, it read. Of course, he had no idea what geographical area it coincided with. The East Coast? The West Coast? Mozambique? Could be any time zone . . . really no need to get up . . .

His eyes began drifting shut again. Except. There was still coffee. He could smell it.

He sat up, stifling a yawn and rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Slightly more alert, he remembered--he had been traipsing around the Watchtower with an insane man who could not utter a complete sentence to save his life and the favorite son of the military-industrial complex. He felt a wave of unease when he realized he had slept in the same general vicinity as a certified madman . . . AFTER rather rudely telling him to sleep in the coat closet. Ah well . . . the Question was at least lucid enough to realize that he couldn't go anywhere in the Watchtower without the hacking skills of the Blue Beetle. Probably. He hoped.

With a sigh, he pushed the covers aside and got up, stretching. Wiggling his feet into the slippers at the side of the bed, he walked past the window . . . then paused.

Window? On the moon?

He pulled the curtains back and was confronted with blackness. Not the deep, starry blackness of space, but a half-hearted, greyish blackness. Beetle rested his fingertips on the "window" and watched miniature distortions ripple around his fingers. It was a LCD screen framed with curtains. Running his fingers over the windowframe, he found a set of well-hidden controls. He pressed the left-most button, a small green circle, and a scene slowly faded into view, an alien landscape of lavender and pale blue. Whisps of wind sent pale purple sand skittering around the craggy rock formations "outside", completing the illusion. Interesting. He wondered what planet it was supposed to be. He examined the other buttons on the miniature control panel and (after a few false tries) managed to get to a menu screen. He consecutively summoned scenes from Manhattan, Mars, Jupiter, and even a scene from _Hamlet._ Why anyone would want to look out their window and see a moody twenty-something staring morosely at a skull was beyond him, but if they wanted to . . . they could! Beetle returned to the menu, this time choosing "Hawaii", and an endless sunlit ocean of deep, deep blue appeared in front of him.

"If they've got one of those Star Trek-y holodecks too, this could be a regular vacation spot," Beetle mused. If Booster were around, that would certainly be his first suggestion. But of course Blue Beetle had enough common sense to avoid those sort of schemes, even though it could potentially make millions. Millions.

"Speaking of making money . . ." he said to himself. Technically, his presence was only required in the office when he_ felt_ like it--that was one of the perks of being the guy in charge--but he did try to let the staff know when he was going to be gone.

Glancing at the desk beside the bed, he spotted a neat black phone, which he picked up. The first time he dialed the number, the phone merely beeped piercingly. He tried again, this time dialing "9" first. The phone rang. He waited.

"Kordtronics, how may I help you?" the pleasant female voice asked after two rings.

"Heya Carol!"

"Well, if it isn't Mr. Kord, our fearless CEO! So you are alive." The voice took on a mischievous quality. "We were wondering if you'd fallen into a mineshaft or something--"

"What's that, Lassie? Mr. Kord's in the WELL?" a self-styled comedian shouted in the background.

"Tell Bob I heard that!"

"He says 'Free raises for everyone!'" Carol announced in a semi-muffled voice, as though she had one hand over the receiver. Several people cheered.

"Oh man, everyone's a comedian!" Ted rolled his eyes, but couldn't suppress a grin. "Listen, I may not be in the office for a few days."

"Where are you? I hear seagulls."

"I'm . . . ah . . . on the waterfront."

"And hula dancers."

"The waterfront in Hawaii," he added quickly. "I don't know how long I'll be gone. But I'll call in once in a while, okay?"

"Hey, you're the boss, boss. Needed some time to lounge around and relax, huh?"

"You have no idea," Ted replied. "Keep the rest of the crew under control, huh?" Carol agreed, said goodbye, and hung up.

"Lounging around. Relaxing. I should be so lucky," Beetle sighed as he resumed his quest for coffee.

He trekked out of the bedroom, pausing when he saw the white-haired figure at the dining room table--Captain Atom in his more . . . well, _human_ form. His back was to Beetle as he sat in his bathrobe, leaning on his elbow and sipping from an official JLA coffee cup. Beetle's eyes narrowed ever so slightly, but his voice was casual as he said, "Up already? Couldn't suppress that military training, huh?"

Captain Atom's hands jerked as he spun around, accidentally sloshing hot coffee over himself. It would probably have been quite painful, except he'd started pulling his metallic skin to the surface the moment Beetle spoke. It started in patches, with small splotches of silver appearing on his wrists and cheekbones, but within seconds the sleek metal was expanding and pooling, pouring over his face and even coating his hair.

Oddly enough, the process also made Captain Atom's bathrobe disappear. Not that he really needed it in his superhero form, but he nevertheless sat down _very_ quickly and scraped the dining room chair as he scooted closer to the table.

"Ah . . ." He grabbed a napkin and began wiping up the splashes of coffee discoloring his metallic red hands. "Excuse me." And he made a quantum-aided dash to the bathroom, slamming the door behind him.

Blue Beetle shook his head in disgust, then poured himself a cup of coffee. As he looked through the cupboards for the sugar, Captain Atom emerged from the bathroom. He still had his stainless steel sheen, but was now wearing the bathrobe again. Since he hadn't knotted the terrycloth belt at his waist, it was apparent that he was also wearing boxer shorts.

Beetle raised his eyebrows as he eyed the huge red kiss emblazoned on the side. "Those are government issue, are they?"

Captain Atom pulled his bathrobe closed. "They're . . . My wife gave them to me."

"Ah, your wife._ Plastique._ You know," Blue Beetle mused, "it really surprises me that you would marry a terrorist. Even a reformed terrorist. Or was that just so you could keep track of her for your pals in the Pentagon?"

"I . . ." Captain Atom's hands were trembling as he knotted the belt around his waist in a lopsided bow. "I _love_ Bette. Whatever she's done wrong in the past, she's _more_ than made up for it, and . . . and . . ."

"Didn't she try to blow up the Statue of Liberty once?" Beetle said thoughtfully.

"But she _didn't,_ I _stopped_ her," Atom gritted.

"Was that before or after you two got stranded together in the hot, steamy jungles of Cambodia?" asked Beetle, whose knowledge of past and present metahuman activities had increased twentyfold since befriending the information broker, Oracle.

"I . . . she . . . it's not like we . . ." The Captain's cheeks tarnished; it took Beetle a moment to remember that it meant he was blushing. _"Before."_

"Mm." Beetle poured himself more coffee. Truthfully, he had nothing against Plastique. Well, he'd had something against her when she'd been running around tossing explosive charges at people in the name of Quebec separatism, of course, but to be fair that _had_ been quite a while ago. "Did you call her?"

Captain Atom stared. "What?"

"Did you _call_ her?" Beetle repeated. After a pause: "To let her know where you are?"

"Oh. I . . . No, I left her note, though. Last night."

"Well, if you think that's sufficient . . ." He gave the Captain a sideways look, but didn't receive an answer. With a mental shrug, Beetle exited the kitchen, retrieved his costume from the bedroom, and returned to throw it into the washer he'd spotted earlier in the pantry. Thank God he'd had the foresight to make his outfit machine-washable. After measuring out the laundry soap, he wandered back to the kitchen area. Coffee was well and good, but he needed some _real_ breakfast.

"Where's the Question?" he asked as he began rooting through the cupboards.

"The bathtub."

Beetle paused with one hand closed around a box of Pop Tarts, then poked his head around the cupboard door. "The . . . where?"

"The bathtub. In the bathroom," the Silver Savior specified.

Beetle momentarily forgot the strawberry Pop Tarts (with frosting and sprinkles.) "Weren't you just in there?"

The Captain's yellow eyes widened. "I . . . ? Oh, no. No no no. The _other_ bathroom, the one in the monkey room."

Beetle's eyes narrowed. "The monkey room? What, are you speaking in tongues?"

"If you would just _listen--"_ Captain Atom's voice rose, but then he cut himself off with a sigh. "The room that the Question went into last night with all those sheets and things--it used to be a second bedroom. Probably the master bedroom, because it has an attached bathroom."

"Ah, so he's in there."

"Right."

"In the tub."

"He was last night, yeah."

"Sooo . . ." Beetle paused. _"Where_ do the monkeys come in?"

"There was this paper, and someone had written . . . You know what, it doesn't matter anyway, they're all _dead._ Just forget it. Forget about the damn monkeys." Captain Atom's voice was taut as he threw his coffee cup into the sink. He must have unintentionally tapped into his quantum super-strength, judging by his expression as the cup hit the side of the sink and shattered. He stared at the shards for a moment, then turned on his heel and left without another word.

Beetle raised an eyebrow as he watched him leave. "Well, well, well. Isn't _someone_ tense?" He carefully plucked the largest jagged fragments out of the sink and tossed them in garbage, then took a spare washcloth and started sweeping the smaller ceramic splinters out of the sink. Despite his caution, his hand slipped as he was handling a particularly sharp shard. "Ow," he murmured as a drop of blood swelled on his first finger. He headed to the main bathroom and searched around until he found a box of Band-Aids. After applying one to the offending digit, he returned to the kitchen and discovered Captain Atom was back as well . . . sitting at the dining room table with another cup of coffee.

"You know, _some of us _stay and _clean up_ our messes," Beetle said with a pointed look. "Although I suppose it _is_ easier to just let someone else take responsibility."

Atom didn't say anything. Blue Beetle snorted, then went to check on his costume. The wash cycle had completed, so he transferred it to the dryer. When he re-entered the kitchen, the Captain was still staring into the depths of his coffee.

"What's the matter? Sulking because the Question won't come out and play?"

"I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing up here running around with him," Captain Atom murmured. "He can't be trusted."

_"What_ a coincidence," Beetle replied, looking directly at Captain Atom. "I was just sitting here thinking _exactly_ the same thing." And he smiled. But not a nice smile.

Captain Atom looked up with an expression that struggled between anger and frustration, before the emotion drained out of his face. He traced one metallic red finger along the rim of his coffee cup and finally said, "You know . . . I know we were never exactly _friends,_ but I really thought . . . maybe we'd moved beyond this point . . ."

"Apparently one of us did." The comment came out more acidic than Beetle had intended. "Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to check on the faceless wonder."

He had already stalked out of the dining room and almost reached the second bedroom when Captain Atom called after him. "Blue Beetle?"

He paused on the threshold. "What?"

"Would it help if I said I was sorry?"

Beetle turned and stared at him for a full minute. "No." And he stalked away.

He didn't really have a plan as he approached the bathroom door. He looked at it for a moment, picturing himself kicking it in to the surprise of a shocked and (in his mind) horrified Question, before returning to Plan A and simply knocking. Well, more like _banging_, really, because thanks to Captain A-Bomb he was now in a bad mood. But it was the same idea.

"Hey, get up!" he said, just in case the Question hadn't received the message.

No reply.

"You _really_ don't want to give me an excuse to kick down the door right now. Believe me."

Silence.

Beetle found this somewhat unnerving, and thus his next query of "Question?" was in a quieter, more hesitant tone.

"Okay, it's your funeral." But his bravado, like his anger, had faded by the time he jiggled the doorknob. He just wanted to get a feel for how sturdy the door was. He didn't expect it to actually _open._

Back in the dining room, Captain Atom was still staring into his coffee as though he expected to find the answer he was looking for in the swirls of dark liquid. He had wondered, when he received the Beetle's late night phone call, whether Blue Beetle had decided to let sleeping dogs lie for once. But no; apparently the blue-clad superhero was more a fan of poking, shaking, and yelling "HEY!" at sleeping dogs until they woke up. And then enthusiastically pulling out a can of mace.

The worst part, Nate thought, was that Beetle himself had seemed to halfway forget his animosity once in a while as they had wound their way through the Watchtower. Some people were born adventurers and some had the role thrust upon them; Beetle was clearly one of the former, and although Nate had no doubt that he really did want to keep an eye on the Question, he had a notion that Beetle was having the time of his life hacking through the JLA's firewalls. All in all, it made for a warped sense of almost-normalcy. As normal as life could be when you were trying not to get fried by lasers on the moon, anyway.

Captain Atom had just settled in for a session of intense, self-recriminating brooding when Blue Beetle returned looking shaken. He entered the pantry, moving with uncharacteristic hesitation, and a minute later was shaking out his costume and pulling a statically-charged dryer sheet off his cowl. "We have a problem."

"Yeah, no kidding," Nate said as a brief flash of anger washed over him. _Beetle_ was the one who wouldn't accept an apology, after all.

"No, a _real_ problem," Blue Beetle clarified. "The Question's gone."


	13. Chapter 12: The Method to His Madness

  


_**Chapter Twelve**_

* * *

Captain Atom stared. "Gone? What do you mean, _gone?"_

"Unless some new definitions for 'gone' have been added to the dictionary in the last few minutes, I think you know what I mean," Beetle snapped. 

"Are you sure you were looking in the right place?" Now Atom sounded downright doubtful. "He was in--" 

"The bathroom, yes, yes. He obviously _was_ there because there are sheets in the bathtub and the whole place smells faintly of formaldehyde, but he's gone." Blue Beetle suddenly cocked his head to one side. "You know, I never really registered that before, but he does." 

"Does what?" 

"Smell like formaldehyde." It was a faint, pervasive odor that hung around the Hub City vigilante, but Beetle wasn't overly surprised that he hadn't noticed it before. That trenchcoat could definitely use a good washing. 

"You know, as _enthralling_ as that is, maybe we should be focusing more on finding the Question, now that you _lost_ him," Captain Atom said drily, completing his usual shift from Guilt-Ridden to Broody to Pissy. 

"Excuse me? _I_ lost him? _I?_ You were the one sleeping out here!" 

"Yeah, out here on the _couch_ in the other room." 

"Closer than the bedroom!" 

"Well, I didn't think he was going to run off when the security system had just about blown his head off before!" 

"Well, _I_ . . . didn't think so either." Beetle paused. Had they just agreed on something? 

"We should have arranged watches in case the little psycho tried something like this. We're lucky he didn't kill us in our sleep . . ." the Captain muttered. 

Beetle, whose thoughts had been running along uncomfortably similar lines, said, "Well, it shouldn't be hard to hack into the security system and find him." He trotted back to his bedroom to access the WayneCorp 3030 LE and Captain Atom trailed along behind him. Beetle hesitated as he flipped open the laptop's screen, briefly staring into space with unfocused eyes. "It is strange . . . He had a plan to get up here. Okay, not the best plan in the world, since he had to blackmail him into helping, but it _did_ work. And he had an amazingly accurate map of the Watchtower, considering it was drawn on a grocery bag . . ." 

Captain Atom was nonplused. "So? He could have a day job as an architect for all we know." 

Personally, Blue Beetle couldn't imagine the Question holding down any work that didn't have a job description of "raving lunatic", but he let the matter slide. Instead he said, "I just think it's a little odd that after all that planning, he hadn't thought out a way to bypass the security system. I mean, originally he couldn't count on you blasting them out or me overriding them; as far as he knew, neither of us would even _be_ in the Watchtower. Hell, he didn't know _you_ would be within a fifty mile radius!" 

Predictably, the Silver Savior muttered something about _wishing_ he weren't in a fifty mile radius. Then he added, "So he got lucky. It happens." 

"I dunno," Beetle said doubtfully as the licensed version of Windows JLA (motto: "Who do you want to save today?") opened with a flourish. "I don't think people like the Question believe in luck." 

Blue Beetle was even more certain of this a minute later, when he tried to access the network. Apparently the Question had foreseen this possibility . . . so he'd taken the modem. 

Beetle closed his eyes and sighed. It was going to be a long day. 

* * *

Prowling, clinging to the shadows, the Question slunk, tensing as he peered down the gleaming corridors of the Watchtower. Too quiet. Too clean. Far, far too bright--florescent bulbs everywhere, making his head ache. This was a bad place for him, no doubt fine for the cosmic beings like Superman (who was dead) and Firestorm (who was not), but a bad place for men who were more mortal than god. But he was here . . . thanks in part to Batman. 

The Question had been busy breaking the jaw of a rapist when the Batman's infamous, deadly protocols had been stolen by Ra's al Ghul--Ra's, who did not care about any creature more intelligent than an ape (excepting his daughter) and who had used the Dark Knight's own plans to incapacitate the Justice League. When the Question did find out about it--and he only did because he happened to take on a group of looters trying to steal TVs from a storefront the next night--he was not really surprised to find that Batman, having stormed Olympus, had made contingency plans to secure his place there. It was probably not so hard. Even Achilles had his heel. 

The Question understood the Bat, in that regard. Life was unstable, untrustworthy, and men doubly so. _(He_ had once trusted, trusted Green Lantern, the old Green Lantern, to protect Coast City. Never, never, never again.) The Question had paused with the bodies of his victims scattered around him, lying unconscious or groaning as they clutched at their ribs (their guns forgotten), and he had watched the news footage of the Martian burnt nearly beyond recognition and the Kryptonian with his muscles and bones vaguely visible through skin made transparent by a hybrid kryptonite isotope, and he had felt nothing. Nothing but a vague sense of satisfaction that someone, at least _someone,_ even if it _was_ Batman, was watching these super-men, these gods who shot fire from their eyes and spewed ice from their mouths and could not save Coast City from destruction or stop Hub City from devouring itself. 

But then he wondered: who was watching Batman? Protocols or no, he disliked the Bat intensely; Batman had once saved his life, and for that he could never be forgiven. Still, the rest of the League would be wary now that they knew about the Bat's plans, his protocols. They could watch each other. 

But then the Justice League died. 

The Question had not found out about that for quite a while. He didn't watch the news (although he once had, in his days of vanity.) But he did sometimes catch the tattered newspapers blowing along the streets to get a feel for what part of Hub City he should storm through next. For that he only needed the Regional section of the paper. But in this case, the banner headline on the front page caught his attention: "JLA REBORN." 

The Question knew the requirement for rebirth: you first must die. He checked the article and, sure enough, the JLA was dead (though the details of their demise were vague; something to do with a search for Aquaman.) But Batman had had a protocol for that too, apparently, because dead or not, he had formed his own League. Long live the JLA. 

The article listed the abilities and histories of the new Leaguers with enthusiasm just muted enough to be respectful to the deceased League. The Question examined the new roster with growing dissatisfaction. Some of the people he had never heard of; others he had never liked. One of them called herself "Faith", a name he instantly distrusted. The faceless vigilante scanned restlessly through the list with until a final name caught his attention. Green Arrow. Naturally, he assumed they were referring to the second Green Arrow, a young man with dark skin and close cut blond hair. Then he looked at the accompanying picture and found Oliver Queen looking back at him. 

Oliver, who was the original Green Arrow. 

Oliver, who was dead. 

He had lost six or seven years on his way back to life, judging from the picture, and had returned to a previous, brighter costume, but it certainly looked like him. According to the paper, he had "mysteriously reappeared" several months previous. The Question reread the article and then released the newspaper which scattered, pages blowing apart haphazardly in a gust of wind. And then, as though nothing had happened, he went down to the docks to find some drug runners and break some bones. 

But he didn't forget. And he would sometimes pause with one hand clenched in a fist and the other wrapped firmly around the collar of some slumped and bruised thug, and turn his eyeless face to the moon. And he understood that the hour was at last at hand. 

Getting the information he needed was not so hard; that was what the Internet was for. The Question disliked and distrusted machines, much as he distrusted anything that was not encouraged to provide information with the assistance of a solid, well-placed kick and a few shattered ribs. More to the point, the Question couldn't even turn on a computer (although he was dimly aware that he had known how to use them at one time . . . before . . .) 

Fortunately, Hub City had a good number of computer literate criminals, particularly in the crime families, so the Question had kicked his way into the Vernelli stronghold, roused the head of the household, and told him precisely where he wanted to go today. In an uncharacteristic bout of nervous anticipation, the vigilante had accidentally broken one of Vernelli's wrists pulling him out of bed . . . but that was okay, the mob boss had plenty of lackeys who could type for him. 

Even with the Question's admittedly vague demands ("Information on the Watchtower. _Now."_), they had not had much trouble discovering entire message boards devoted to the "technological masterpiece" that was the Watchtower. To the Question's disgust and amazement, cyberspace was full of simpering sycophants all too eager to expound the details of the "brilliantly" designed moonbase. Rather than sifting through it all then and there, the drek of the computer age, the Question left with a sheaf of printouts under his arm. But not before setting fire to the computer. There were probably easier ways of preventing the crime family from getting a closer look at the questions he'd been asking . . . but none so satisfying. 

After due consideration, the Question concluded that the Blue Beetle's assistance, willingly given or not, would be necessary. The decision had been . . . difficult. True, the Blue Beetle had the necessary skills with computers, electronic things, and could probably be fairly easily persuaded with some minimal violence. Additionally, it was simply . . . appropriate. What had to happen had to happen. It was destiny. 

Nevertheless, the Question found Blue Beetle's naivety irritating, that and his stupid, baseless belief that life was worth living. Life was _not_ worth living; it was merely too much trouble to die. It was understandable, not forgivable, but _understandable_ that those who ruled morality in their benevolent dictatorship of hypersonic speed and heat vision would perceive the world as being as brightly hued as their capes as they watched it from on high, but the fact that Blue Beetle--non-powered, semi-impoverished Blue Beetle, who had been beaten comatose at least twice in his Justice League tenure--should wrap himself in such unprovoked optimism was, in the Question's mind, baffling. 

Still and all, Blue Beetle had been surprisingly irritable, very unhappy in fact, to find the Question in his armchair . . . even though the Question had gone through great lengths, true extremes, to be polite. He had taken care of the screaming smoke detector for the Blue Beetle and had offered to take care of his screaming landlady as well, though the Beetle had not seemed especially grateful. If he had been _grateful,_ he wouldn't have rigged the Watchtower's security system. If he had been _grateful_, he wouldn't have called Captain Atom. 

The Question paused for just a moment in his exploration of the Watchtower before continuing on. (It was important to keep a constant pace so he could stay just a bit ahead of the automated security systems, which took a few seconds to warm up in each hallway.) Captain Atom. Puppet of the government and lap dog of the military. The Question had never met him before, but he had heard about him, enough to read between the lines, and there were rumors, rumors from sources that only the Question would have considered reliable. A silver-plated piece of propaganda and a living weapon besides, the Captain's leash had recently been gathered in new hands at the Pentagon. That made little difference to the Question, who mistrusted him in any case. (He had, after all, read the unhappy ending . . . hadn't he? He couldn't always separate what he had seen and what he had dreamed, these days . . . but he would check. He would check. And watch. And then, then, _then_ they would see who was right and who was dead.) 

He shook his head and forced himself to focus. Now was not the time. He had to be ready. He glanced over his shoulder as he slipped through the halls and made a conscious effort to tread down the middle of the corridor, out of the shadows, no matter how exposed and uncomfortable it made him feel. This was part of his original plan, and he did not feel like altering it, although he supposed he could have, since the Blue Beetle had shown up with his techno-magic that humbled the Watchtower. 

The Question really did not have much use for plans, or at least not for any plans more complicated than "hide in the shadows, then attack." But he recognized that invading the moon was an exceptional case, so he had sat up many long nights on the moonlit rooftops of Hub City, gripping a pencil in his once-elegant, now-ragged glove as he carefully, painfully straightened his thoughts and plotted out a course of action on whatever scraps of paper he could find. He was not sure what he would find in the Watchtower. He was not even sure what he was _looking_ for in the Watchtower. But that was why he had to go there, after all--because Questions had to be answered. 

The Question had known that, stealthy though he was, he could not hope to evade the sensors of the Watchtower. Therefore, he had foreseen conflict with the League as inevitable. He did not think the Beetle appreciated this point and was SURE that Captain Atom, though he had been the one to set off the security protocols in his carelessness, didn't. They had looked at him, when the Beetle was trying to contact the JLA through his jury-rigged communicator, as though they expected him to object. Or attack. (Not that there was much difference between the two.) Frankly, the Question would have been glad for Hawkgirl to show up so he could get on with his plan. 

It _was_ Hawkgirl's shift; he had made sure of that. Although his distrust of computers persisted, the Internet's glut of information had earned his grudging admiration . . . that and the fanboys who were so obsessed that they had successfully extrapolated the Justice League's Monitor Womb schedule based on when the JLA members were or weren't seen fighting crime individually in their home cities. Fortunately, she should still be on duty. Hawkgirl, the Question felt, was the Leaguer he would have the easiest time against. She flew--which should not be a huge advantage in the tight corridors of the Watchtower--had a fascination with ancient weapons, and was adept at hand-to-hand combat. 

But the Question, the Question had fought none other than the great Lady Shiva. He had lost, of course, but he had also _survived_, and against Shiva that was an accomplishment indeed. More to the point, she had seen something in him, some thirst for violence that she liked, and she had trained him. Just a little bit . . . but being trained "a little bit" by Shiva was like gaining a fraction of infinity. The Question felt sure he could handle Hawkgirl. And that was as far as his plan extended. He would just see what happened after the fight. Ask some quesitons. No doubt he could draw some information out of Hawkgirl. 

But first he had to attract her attention . . . 

He paused, glancing upward at the smooth metal ceiling. No visible cameras but he had felt the unblinking electronic eyes peering down at him as soon as he crawled out of the ductwork. (He didn't want the JLA to pinpoint the quarters that the Beetle had so conveniently secured, so he had exited the apartment by an alternate route.) Surely Hawkgirl had spotted him by now. Probably already tracking him through the metal rat's maze. 

His pace quickened to a steady run as he darted around a corner. Despite what the Beetle thought, the closets were _not_ the only unweaponed areas in the Watchtower. The Question paused for only an instant before pushing through an oddly out-of-place door with a fake wood finish and a familiar white and black pictogram on a plastic plaque securely screwed it. Inside, the glare of stale metal walls was replaced by bright linoleum and spotless white porcelain. The Question felt a smug satisfaction as he stood with his back against the door. 

No one had thought to put armaments in the bathrooms. 

He had chosen the ladies room, on the grounds that he might need to convince Hawkgirl to assist him and he did not want to alienate her by forcing her to invade the men's room. He was not inconsiderate, after all. 

He stepped deeper into the room, glancing around. Sinks to his right, stalls to his left . . . At the end of the room, a full mirror encompassed the entire wall. He stepped towards it, watching his double draw nearer . . . trenchcoat flowing over a dark, stained suit and a tie like an upside-down exclamation mark. 

It had been a long time since he had seen himself. The figure in the mirror reached out, touching gloved fingertips to his own. He observed his smooth-skinned visage, marred by neither eyes nor mouth. His hairline curved from under his battered hat, the locks short and neat (though he did not remember ever having it cut,) and primarily jet black, although here and there a tint of light orange showed through. He tilted his head and his brow wrinkled minutely in a frown; he did not remember having orange hair. 

Well, it hardly mattered. He hoisted himself up, sat on the edge of the ledge that supported the sinks, and waited for Hawkgirl. 

Back in the Monitor Womb, Jason Blood stared coldly at a certain flickering computer screen over steepled fingers. "Time to clean out the bathroom." 

  



	14. Chapter 13: The Abyss Gazes Also

  


_**Chapter Thirteen**_

* * *

Jason Blood was sitting hunched and anachronistic in his neat black suit, seated in the Monitor Womb's floating chair and hovering amidst the translucent, holographically projected screens, when the alarms began to ring. 

He was not alone, of course. Never alone. 

As the emergency lights began flashing, he understood the stress he had heard in Hawkgirl's rising voice when he came across her in the lounge, gulping down aspirin. "I'm sorry to pull this on you, Mr. Blood, but if I have to be around those--" (here she inserted various colorful but unprintable adjectives) "--computers _one more minute--!"_ She ended her statement with a bestial growl. 

"Not at all, Hawkgirl," Jason replied in his cool, hooded voice. "I am, after all, part of the League now," he added, more out of bitter irony than anything else. 

"Yeah, well . . . have fun on monitor duty," Hawkgirl had called over her shoulder as she left, heading towards the teleporters. "It's _hell_ in there." 

But Hawkgirl was wrong. Hell was much worse. 

Something hissed in the back of Jason's mind, some dark, caressing whisper, but he ignored it, just as he ignored the blaring alarms. He was used to background noise. Although he had studied crumbling books and arcane runes more than computers, Jason carefully regarded each monitor, cycling through them until he found what he was looking for. 

An intruder. 

He didn't fit Jason's notion of a "supervillain"--that is, the individual did not wear a gaudy, ridiculous costume . . . just a battered hat that hid his face from the strategically angled cameras and a black trenchcoat that had seen better days. But then, Jason had only a passing knowledge of supervillains. He was not, after all, a superhero himself. He was not any sort of hero. 

The rest of the new JLA must wonder at his inclusion in their ranks--no costume, no codename, no reputation--except as a demonologist. Just a normal man with piercing green eyes and a white streak running through his deep red hair. Just a normal man caught up in self-sustained hell for over a millennium. 

The whisper in the back of his head was audible this time. 

_Be brightest day, be blackest night,   
The brooding Blood still rues his plight;  
"Ah me, my past and future stole!"  
Oh, Jase, Jase, Jase . . . your plaint grows old._

Jason Blood did not give the faintest indication that he'd heard the black-rimmed voice, not the slightest thinning of his lips. He'd learned long ago that it wouldn't do a bit of good. Best to pretend he didn't hear . . . 

_That's right, good boy, I don't exist!  
There's flesh, there's bone, and nothing twixt  
On which the shattr'd mind must dwell--  
No high-flung Heaven; no deep-sunk Hell._

Jason's expression tightened minutely. _This is hardly Hell,_ he reminded himself drily as he watched the intruder on the monitor. _Unless it's been relocated to the moon . . ._

_The lifeless moon, made live by man,_ came the reply,  
_Sweet playground for bad Etrigan!_

"Over my dead body," Jason said aloud, soft and sincere. 

_Twould be acceptable, I deem.  
Ah, happy day! Ah, splendid dream!_

Jason did not bother to respond, mentally or otherwise, to the threat. The voice, with its thin veneer of mockery barely stretched over deep undercurrents of malice and corruption, had not truly frightened him in a long time. Sometimes as he sat in his dark Gotham townhouse and stared into the crackling fireplace (with its licks of flame that spat and disappeared), he wondered at his own complacency and dispassion over his demon. Over Etrigan. 

It was cruel, manipulating Merlin who had long ago summoned Etrigan, his demonic half-brother, to defend the realm of Camelot, but it was _Jason_ who paid the price of the wizard's arrogance. For when Merlin found he could not return the demon to Hell, he decided to cage Etrigan instead. And so he did, in a cage of flesh. A cage named Jason. 

He was only Jason then, not having earned his surname. But it did not take long. Men's minds do not do well, chained to hellfire. Jason had once had a family, before he killed them, his dear wife and his little children. The townsfolk were horrified, aghast. But that was all right; they would not have to think on the matter long. They were next. 

And so he became Jason Blood. 

When his struggling psyche gained some faint semblance of order again--and _that_ took over a year--he pushed the demon to the back of his mind, separated his soul from Etrigan's as best he could. But he never truly returned to what he once had been. Blood, he found, does not wash away. 

Etrigan, for his part, manipulated as well as Merlin ever had, rearranging Jason's memories until he forgot what he had lost and what he had gained. So Jason wandered through the centuries, only rarely aware of the true nature of his burden. He hated Etrigan, when he remembered him, and Etrigan returned the favor. 

But right _now_ Jason had the advantage. He had sought out deceitful, undying Merlin and demanded his memories, and after he could do more than weep at deeds he had done and forgotten, he discovered that the old saying was true. Knowledge _is_ power. 

For the first time in a millennium, Jason Blood could see the sum of the parts. He knew about himself. And Etrigan. And Merlin. And his own magic, learned as he tried to separate himself from the demon over the centuries. And if he didn't know how to destroy Etrigan, at least he knew how to hurt him. He carried a flask of holy water in the pocket of his suit, because Etrigan writhed in anger and agony when he drank from it. You did not have to be a demon to be cruel. 

Jason Blood did not intend to allow the balance of power to shift again. His desire to see Etrigan humiliated, defeated, destroyed, was quite literally stronger than life itself. He would have killed himself in an instant if he knew, positively _knew_ that his suicide would drag Etrigan headlong into eternal death as well. 

But he could not say for _certain_ that would work, and so Jason Blood lived, lest his death free the demon. No hero he, but he would not loose the demon on the world. He would not. 

_Brave words, oh host, yet time on time  
When danger strikes, out rings the rhyme:  
"Gone, gone, O man!" the chant is vent  
And Etrigan is freedom lent.  
The piper plays, you pay the fee.  
As for your vow--well, we shall see.  
Though strongly said and truly meant . . .  
_Which_ path is paved with good intent?_

Jason's lip curled. True, he had at times summoned forth Etrigan--an easy if painful process, as he only needed to speak or even simply hear Merlin's ancient spell to spark the transformation: "Gone, gone the form of man, rise the demon Etrigan!" 

But he only freed the demon as a last resort, in times of dire need. Since they shared a body, so to speak, one could not roam free without displacing the other. When Etrigan prowled the earth, casually spewing hellfire as he sneered at humanity through his piggy red eyes, Jason Blood was forced . . . elsewhere. It was an unpleasant and isolated elsewhere, and when he was there he could never be sure what Etrigan was doing or when the demon would free him with the counter-chant. Or _if_ he would free him. 

In any case, Etrigan hated humanity in general only slightly less than he hated Jason Blood in particular. Jason was sure as hell not going to release him in the Watchtower, a nexus of potentially deadly weaponry and technology. 

_"As sure as Hell" is sure indeed._ Etrigan's grin, though not visible, was still apparent.  
_In that, dear Blood, we are agreed._

The dim light of the monitors threw ominous shadows flickering across Jason's face, but he did not seem to hear Etrigan's remark. He took one last look at the computer screen and said, "Time to clean out the bathroom." 

Instead of lowering the floating chair, he simply stepped onto nothingness and walked down on empty air. Entering the alarmingly sterile and barren hallways, he headed for the lower levels of the Watchtower; their mystery visitor was in a low security area, somewhat near the expansive, empty loading bays where food and other daily necessities were mass-teleported in. And yet he knew the intruder could not have entered through those; they were not designed to transport living matter. Even yogurt would not come through them properly, as it contained live cultures. 

As he neared the area where he had spotted the prowler, he paused and murmured a minor cantrip. Slowly, a faint purple light washed across the floor, rippling in on itself as it condensed and compacted until a path of glowing purple footprints stretched neatly in front of Jason. He had limited the spell's radius to ten feet, centered on himself, as he did not want to alert the man in the trenchcoat to his presence. If Jason had looked behind himself as he began tracking his quarry, he would have seen the ghostly footprints fading out behind him as he began stalking down the hall. But he didn't look. 

The trail never doubled back on itself, but it wandered, drifting from the center of the corridor to the far side, sometimes to the extent that the intruder must have been literally pressed against the wall. And yet on the monitor, Jason had seen the battered hat surreptitiously tilt towards the camera, as if the man knew he was being watched. Why cling to the side of the hallway, then? He couldn't have thought that would be sufficient to conceal him . . . 

_A thought this demon's often mused;  
Why will man fight when he must lose?_

The demon's mocking laughter clarified exactly _whose_ fight he had pondered. Jason, who had long ago learned to live with such haranguing, merely said, "Mused and lose don't rhyme." 

_You've not read Frost? Go take a peek!  
When a rhyme's not quite, it's called oblique._

"Mm-hm." Truthfully, Jason Blood was more interested the glowing footsteps than in Etrigan's poetic inspiration. Here where the corridors intersected, the footprints were spaced farther apart . . . not quite far enough to indicate that the mystery man had been running, but close. Jason turned the corner, following. The trail led to a double-hinged swinging door marked with the stick figure of a woman (her gender identifiable due to her silhouetted dress or skirt.) The footprints disappeared at the threshold, glowing only faintly as the door was just on the edge of Jason's cantrip, and did not come out again. Apparently the intruder was still in the women's bathroom. 

Well, at least the hiding place was . . . original. Jason extinguished his spell with a flick of his fingers and walked through the door. The tiled room was bright and antiseptic as only bathrooms and hospitals can be, and it smelled vaguely of violets. 

To the left were the restroom stalls. 

Directly ahead was a mirror encompassing the entire wall. 

To the right, sitting on a ledge with sinks sunk into false marble, was a faceless man. 

He paused for just an instant as Jason entered, then slid from his perch, every movement graceful and minimal. His trenchcoat fell about him neatly as he stood, head tilted thoughtfully, facing Jason Blood. 

The room grew still. Jason silently readied spells of defense and destruction, but waited for the stranger to make the first move. For a long time the only sound was the faint squeak of the door as it swung gently on its hinges in double, once in the doorway and once again in the mirror. 

At last a voice with an oddly uneven pitch broke the silence: "You're not Hawkgirl." 

"Very observant," Jason Blood said, tense and ready, but nurturing a detached curiousity as well. "And who are you?" 

"Good question." 

Jason waited for more. Nothing came. "You broke into the Watchtower," he said at last. "You crept through the halls and now you're hiding in the ladies room. Not acts that inspire trust, I'm afraid." 

"Trust . . . Overrated. Don't you agree, Mr. Blood?" 

Jason raised an eyebrow. He was hardly the most recognizable member of the Justice League. "So you know who I am." 

"Yes. Do you?" 

Jason tilted his head a fraction. "Do I . . . ?" 

"Know who you are." Despite it's varied timbre, the voice had an underlying calmness to it. 

"I like to think so." 

"Not a matter of what you _like."_ Even eyeless, the stare was disdainful. "You know or you don't." 

"I'm still trying to discover who _you_ are," Jason said cooly. He really had no experience with supervillains, but he had vague memories of seeing one with a faceless gold mask in the news several years back, during a Crisis. "Psycho Pirate, perhaps?" 

_"Psycho Pirate?"_ His voice reflected distaste and scorn. "Hmph. Pathetic manipulator. Destructive, moralless villain. Also insane." 

_That, twould seem,_ does _guarantee  
He's not like current company._ Etrigan sounded amused, not that anyone but Jason heard him. 

Jason himself said, "You aren't a villain then?" 

"No." 

"Then you're a hero, I suppose." 

The man in the trenchcoat leaned his chin into his hand, tapping his cheek thoughtfully with one gloved finger. "Are those all that's left these days?" 

Jason said, perhaps a touch bitterly, "That seems to be the common consensus among people like you." 

A vague impression of a nonexistent eyebrow being raised. "People like me?" 

"People," Jason said, "who wear masks." 

The man shifted a bit for a quick glance in the mirror, then turned back to Jason with a wrinkle on his brow that suggested a frown. He sounded more puzzled than anything else when he said, "I don't wear a mask." 

This time it was Jason who raised an eyebrow. With over a thousand years of practice, he had become adept at seeing through deception and he did not believe he was wrong now. 

_I like this one, this man gone mad  
Who's long forgot the face he had  
As Adam's sons are wont to do.  
Man_ needs _be mad if he'd be true,_ Etrigan whispered in his voice of sweet rot. 

Jason Blood's expression darkened. Although Etrigan had confirmed that this black-coated man _was_ a man (and the demon would have known if he weren't), Jason put little faith in Etrigan's glowing recommendation. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to summon the rest of the JLA," Jason said, fetching a bit of chalk out of his pocket and sketching a glyph in the doorway. Crude work, but it would suffice. "Don't try to leave the room." 

"Hn." The man crossed his arms as he regarded the rough, hasty chalkmarks. "Scribbles." 

"Yes indeed. Scribbles that will set you ablaze if you try to cross them." Jason knew at least twenty ways to call up leaping, crackling flames. People feared fire more than any other earthly element, he had found. "Go ahead and try if you want; I don't care. One way or another, the spell will prevent you from leaving." He turned to go. 

"A problem," the soft, sloughing voice behind him said, "since I can't afford to be stopped." 

Jason Blood turned in time to see a swirl of trenchcoat leaping towards him. He made a quick, complex gesture with his hands, murmured one word in a language far older than Latin, and was suddenly standing three feet to the right of where he'd been. His opponent, unable to stop, nevertheless managed to push off the wall the instant his sole-worn shoes hit it, flipping in midair to land on his feet. 

"You certainly are the aggressive little man, aren't you?" Before Jason got to "certainly", the faceless man was leaping at him again. By the time he got to "aggressive", the man was hanging motionless in front of him, suspended in midair. With one hand leading and one drawn back, one leg folded beneath him and the other outstretched, inches from Jason's face, he vaguely resembling a text book illustration of a fighting move. Except any artist would have drawn him with his trenchcoat flung behind him instead of hanging flatly around him. 

Jason looked at him, holding together the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand to sustain the spell. 

_Fly in amber, caught and trapped,_ Etrigan crooned.  
_Time the little bug was zapped?_

Jason sighed in irritation. The demon was nothing if not single-minded, and he knew the man in the trenchcoat would not be able to breathe while Jason held him fast. But Jason was not a killer. These days. Not of anything human, at any rate. Still, he waited about forty seconds before he made a tossing gesture that both freed his prisoner and sent him tumbling across the linoleum. This time he did not land on his feet. 

"Ah . . . ah huh . . . ah huh . . . _Hn."_ The man pushed himself unsteadily to his feet, resting his hands on his knees as he tried to catch his breath. "Not . . . ah huh . . . playing fair, Jason Blood." 

"I didn't realize it was a game," Jason said drily. "Or was I supposed to toss out some of the witty banter of which heroes are so fond?" 

"Not a hero, Mr. Blood?" It was half statement, half question. "A villain, then? Been told that those are the only two options for those who wear masks." Without waiting for a reply, he sprung towards Jason. Again. 

Jason waved a hand and watched his opponent abruptly change course, tumble across the squeaking, checkered linoleum, and land with a crash under the row of sinks. "Why do you even try? Surely you know you can't win." 

The featureless man crawled out from under the shadowy undersides of the sinks, retrieving his hat and replacing it with dignity as he turned towards Jason. "You only fight the battles you can win, then, Jason Blood?" 

Jason hesitated. Etrigan laughed. "Why are you here?" Jason said at last. 

"Hmph. Asking questions? Never answered _me,_ I notice." 

"What didn't I answer?" 

"Do you know who you are?" 

_Go on, dear Jase, give answer, do!  
Surely you know which you is you?_ Etrigan said gleefully. 

"I'm Jason Blood. Isn't that enough?" He was surprised to hear the bitterness rolling from his words, anger saved and stored over the centuries. He took a deep, controlling breath; when he spoke again, his voice was calmer. "And _who_ are _you?"_

"Good question." 

The conversation had just lapped itself. Jason felt distinctly irritated and somewhat tired. "I'll let the rest of the JLA decide what to do with you. Nothing half so bad as you deserve, I'm sure." 

"Jason." There was a kind of awkward, lopsided concern in the word. "Why are _you_ here?" 

Jason paused, feeling defensive and wary of the sincerity in the stranger's voice. "I'm JLA." 

"Why?" 

"Because I knew Batman? Because they needed someone to bolster their pitifully vulnerable headquarters?" (Any mage with an ounce of power could have stormed the Watchtower before Jason had cast his protective spells.) Jason shrugged casually. "They could have asked anyone. They happened to ask me." 

"Not what I meant." the man said. "You accepted, despite the dangers." 

"What makes you think this is more dangerous than the life I normally lead?" 

"Didn't mean _your_ danger." 

Jason stared. 

_What say you, Blood? What, no reply?  
The Bat's sweet promise you'd decry?_

_Shut up, Etrigan,_ Jason thought crossly, but the demon continued his mocking verse as a corrupt, if recognizable, imitation of Batman's voice hissed through Jason's head. 

_"Oh Jason, I am dead and gone,  
Yet even dead I've not withdrawn  
From tugging on the puppet strings  
And from my plans a new League springs.  
What say you? No? The risk's too grave?  
S'pose I gave th' freedom you crave?"_

_Shut up,_ Jason repeated flatly. He had known Batman. He had trusted Batman with his secret and reluctantly helped him once or twice. He had even liked Batman, in his brooding, distant way, because Batman understood about demons and loss and thus would never try to get so close that Jason would have to push him away. 

However, he would not have joined the JLA, Batman or no, had the Bat not left him the prerecorded message. Batman had said, posthumously, that he might have a solution to--as he termed it--Jason's "problem." Jason didn't really believe it. He had been looking for a way around his "problem" for over a thousand years. But Jason was also desperate. 

Aloud, Jason said, "I had my reasons . . . not that they're any of _your_ business." 

"Aren't they?" 

"Do you turn everything into a question?" 

"Usually." 

"It's very annoying." 

"Is it?" 

_"Yes."_

"Ah." 

Jason was tired of trying to machete his way through the jungle of sentence fragments, abrupt questions, and one word replies. "Please don't jump at me again," he advised, checking the chalky runes once more for safe measure before leaving. "You'll only embarrass yourself." 

"Don't want to fight you, really," came the soft reply. "But I will." 

"Oh? And why is that?" 

"We all have our demons, Jason Blood." 

In spite of himself, Jason half-turned. The man in the trenchcoat was standing in the dead center of the bathroom, arms crossed solemnly. The demonologist's eyes narrowed. "I'm going to ask you one. final. time. What do you want?" 

"Answers." 

"You don't even know the questions." 

"I know at least one of them. Ha. Ha." His stilted laughter, if it could be called that, was one of the eeriest things Jason had heard this side of Hell. Then he added, "So you're JLA, Jason Blood. But are you trustworthy?" 

"You came all the way to the moon on my account? How touching." 

"Not _just_ you. But partly. The JLA . . . bears watching." 

"And you volunteered your services." Jason tilted his head, aware but uncaring of his arrogance. 

"Why not me?" 

_Why not, why not, why not indeed?  
Could be because of psychoses?_ Etrigan chuckled, greatly amused. Jason, who had been thinking along similar lines, minus the mirth, said nothing. 

The faceless man took advantage of the silence to add, "Go home to Gotham, Jason Blood. Stay off the moon. No need for us to fight." 

"I'm afraid that's not possible," Jason said, polite but cool, as he once again walked towards the door, his hard-soled shoes clipping against the tiled floor. "Goodbye, whoever you are." 

"Goodbye, Jason Blood," the stranger replied. "Gone, gone the form of man . . ." 

The cadence was so uneven that it actually took Jason a moment to recognize the familiar chant. Then it struck him with numbing clarity, and he wasted another precious second frozen in horror. No. 

". . . free the prince forever damned. Release the might from fleshy mire . . ." 

Panic clawed at Jason as he felt the magic gathering around him, adhering stickily to his aura as it washed over him, wave on wave. He could hear the blood rushing in his ears. He could hear Etrigan's shrieks of glee echoing in his skull. No. 

"Boil the blood in heart of fire . . ." 

Etrigan. He couldn't, he couldn't, he couldn't let Etrigan loose here. The verse was pulling him in. He could feel the demon tearing at him. Etrigan on the moon. Etrigan in the Watchtower. The weapons. The power. _No._

"Gone, gone the form of man--" 

Never easy to think straight, not when the verse was more than halfway through. He was fading. He was barely there. His sight was already dimming, in a minute he'd lose the body completely. Anger, red fury swept over him, augmented by the demon's bloodlust. He swung around and gestured, a wild sweeping gesture, strong and chaotic. _NO!_

"--rise the demon--_UNGH!!"_ The intruder slammed backwards into the wall, shattering the full mirror. With his hand stretched towards him, Jason held him suspended in mid-air, splayed against the rings of broken glass. 

_"Fool!_ You faceless little _fool!"_ Jason could barely see for anger. His voice trembled with fear and fury. If he hadn't had the strength to throw the spell . . . If the man hadn't used the longer version of the verse . . . "Do you know what you almost _did?"_ Fractured bits of glass broke against the tiles as he drew the faceless man forward a few inches and knocked him into the mirror again. "Do you know what you almost _unleashed? HERE??"_ More glass rained down. _"WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING??"_

"Had to m-make you . . . ah . . . ah . . . understand th' . . . ah . . . ah huh . . . danger--" The stranger spoke with difficulty; the right side of his face pressed hard against the fragmented mirror, pinned by the magic, and he couldn't seem to catch his breath. His trenchcoat spread behind him, clinging desperately to the wall, and his hat had fallen off. He vaguely resembled an dark-winged insect caught in a spiderweb, suspended in the concentric circles of shattered glass as he was. 

"You think I don't _know_ the danger?" Jason hissed. "You think I don't _notice_ the demon? How he lurks? How he laughs? How he overshadows everything I see? Everything I touch? I eat, and it tastes of rot. I smell, and it smells like brimstone. Even when I couldn't remember, I _knew._ Deep down, I _knew_ my demon." 

"Was this . . . the work of the . . . ah huh . . . demon, Jason Blood?" The stranger's neck strained as he turned his head slowly, as though he was working through molasses. He _was_ wearing a mask; the right side of it just under his temple had shredded when it ground against the broken mirror and now welled with blood. "Or _you?"_

Jason stared with teeth clenched at the faint flashes of pale blue eye behind the peels of flesh-like mask and the raw, blood-soaked skin, torn and gritted with glass, with a steady stream of scarlet flowing down the stranger's face to stain his trenchcoat. 

_I knew I liked this unfaced man,  
With scattered thoughts and half a plan!  
First no-face tries to set me free,  
And failing that, he causes_ thee_  
To loose thy anger. I'm avowed,  
Dear Jason Blood, you make me proud!_

Etrigan was gloating, Jason thought numbly. The demon had not sounded so pleased in a long time. And the intruder . . . the intruder, unable to resist the spell for long, allowed his head to slowly gravitate towards the wall again as his chest heaved and he gasped roughly. Gasping, Jason realized suddenly, because he was pinned against the wall with such force that he couldn't draw a proper breath. Suffocating. 

Jason withdrew his hand and the semi-faceless man fell in a shower of broken glass. 

_"Nnnngh . . ."_ The man landed heavily on his side. Blood welled around the hollow of his right eye and seeped through his mask, running in rivulets from where his mouth must have been. 

"Where did you learn the verse?" Jason demanded, but his voice sounded far away.

"Asked . . . asked the right questions to the right . . . _nngh_ . . . people."

"Ah." Jason Blood stared, not at the injured man, but at his own reflection, fragmented and multiplied between the cracks of mirror. "Stay and watch, then," he said at last in his distant voice. "But don't expect help." He swiveled neatly on his heel, scuffed out the warding glyphs with one hard-soled shoe, and left the door swinging behind him. 

On the rapidly reddening bathroom floor, the Question stretched to retrieve his hat, then wiped the trickles of blood away from his mouth with his gloved hand. 

_"Really_ wish it had been Hawkgirl," he muttered before he passed out. 

  



	15. Chapter 14: Reflections Past and Present

  


_**Chapter Fourteen**_

* * *

The Question awoke in a haze of pain and satisfaction. As lay sprawled against the cool floor, focusing on the broadly spread white tiles stretching away from him to the distant, towering wall, he felt a surge of accomplishment. He had defeated Jason Blood.

Still, he reflected as he watched his own blood slowly seeping along the channels of grout sunk between each square tile, it would've been better, much better, if it had been Hawkgirl. Ah well.

He tried to roll over, but that hurt. He tried to prop himself up on his elbows instead. That hurt more.

"Hn . . ." He lay back, forcing his muscles to untense, waiting for the pain to recede to a more manageable level. Irritating, overzealous Jason Blood. Now he would be delayed, just when speed was of the essence. People were plotting and they didn't even know it. Or were they part of the plot? Or was the plot part of them? He wasn't sure anymore.

It couldn't be helped, though, and after some careful twitching and testing, he managed a stark summary of his injuries. Dislocated shoulder. Two, maybe three broken ribs. Possibly a concussion. And although the right side of his face was numb, when he gingerly touched it his glove came back soaked with blood. 

He pulled his glove off with his teeth. (Was his skin always so pale?) It was a little awkward, since he had to use his left hand in order to spare his injured shoulder. He carefully ran his fingers over his temple. Bits of glass, embedded near his cheekbone. The blood flowed freely over his hand as he picked out the shards as best he could. Shreds of skin, hanging loose . . . he pushed them them back into place and the slick sheen of blood held them together in a rough jigsaw puzzle. 

There. That was one thing done.

He carefully supported his weight on his left arm, his good arm, and allowed years of training and instinct to take over as he stumbled to his feet. He swayed a bit as he moved to the wall, but _just_ a bit; he was already meditating, pushing the pain away into some dark corner of his mind. There was no pain, no pain, no pain, none that could be distinguished over the everyday agony of living. He felt nothing at all when he slammed his right shoulder against the ceramic tiles and heard the bone grit back into place. 

The Question flexed his arm a bit as he stepped into the hallway. He did not look back at the shattered mirror or down at the broken chalk circle scuffed by his shoes.

There were others who bore watching.

* * *

Back in the guest quarters, Captain Atom wandered aimlessly over the grey-blue carpeting spread wall-to-wall in the living room, reminding him vaguely of a stormy sea. Every so often he hovered a foot or two off the floor, just for something to do, but mostly he simply paced, feeling frustrated and helpless, missing his wife and wishing that he'd stayed at home. Every few minutes he looked over Beetle's shoulder to see if he'd made any progress jury-rigging the faux window from the furnished bedroom (What had he called it? A LSD screen?) into something that could track down the Question. So far Beetle had not been able to access the information he wanted.

"How's it going?" Nate asked for perhaps the tenth time, looking doubtfully at the blank window/screen leaning against the wall, as well as the wires and memory chips and he-didn't-know-what piled around the bug-themed hero. 

The Blue Beetle shot him a venomous look, as though Captain Atom was purposely taunting him. _"Fine."_ In a crescendoing voice, he proceeded to recite a litany of things, most of which were illegal and all of which were unpleasant, that he would make sure the Question experienced when they finally caught up with him. 

Nate guessed that things were probably not, in fact, fine. He wandered disconsolately to the kitchen, stared around aimlessly, and wandered back again. "Getting there?" he asked Beetle. 

Blue Beetle heaved a sigh, covering his face with one hand as he closed his eyes. "To the outer edge of sanity? Yes, yes, almost there, I'd say."

Captain Atom frowned, not feeling this was the appropriate time for jokes. They'd just set loose a madman in the Watchtower, after all. He watched Beetle work for a few minutes (it seemed to involved a lot of fiddling with wires and muttering swearwords), then picked up the crumpled blanket from his make-shift bed (aka the couch) and left to put it in the washer. He recalled how Plastique had once flooded their own machine after accidentally knocking an entire box of detergent into it and sighed in homesickness. After starting the machine, he returned to the living room. 

"Any luck?"

"I'M WORKING ON IT, OKAY??"

"You know," Captain Atom pointed out, "it only took you three minutes to reprogram that communicator down in the cleaning closet."

"That was different. Completely different. Totally, utterly different. Different hardware. Different software. Different purpose. Okay? Are you happy? Why don't you go away and plan who you're going to backstab next or whatever it is you do for fun?" Beetle said viciously, leaning over his work.

Nate stared, torn between guilt and anger. Beetle was a, a, a stubborn, unforgiving--He'd _said_ he was sorry. Then. Now. _Beetle_ was the one who won't let it drop. But . . . maybe Beetle had a right to hold a grudge. He certainly had a right to be angry. Nate had never denied that.

"Blue Beetle . . ." Nate hesitated, then changed what he was he about to say. "After Ice died, when the Justice League splintered . . . why did you join my team?"

Beetle raised his head and looked at Captain Atom from behind his goggles for a minute, then returned to his work. "Booster wanted to join."

_"That's_ why?" Nate boggled. Blue Beetle had never mentioned their . . . clash . . . while he was in the Captain's (somewhat extreme) version of the JLA and had rarely protested the Silver Savior's plans, but somehow without saying a word, he had always managed to convey that he had neither forgotten nor forgiven what Captain Atom had done. It was all in the tilt of his head, a subtle condescension in his voice. For a long time, Nate had thought Beetle had joined specifically so he _could_ look away when Nate noticed his critical stare. So Nate found it a bit jarring to discover that the reason behind it all was . . . "Because _Booster wanted to?"_

"What's so strange about that?" Beetle said defensively. "It was right after he got thrashed by the stupid Overmaster; he was so mangled I had to build a life support system into his power armor just to keep him alive. What was I _supposed_ to do? Tell him 'If you have any problems with it, call me--I'll be halfway across the country, but I MIGHT get to you before the systems shut down completely and you die'? He's my friend. I was worried about him."

"I remember the armor . . ." Captain Atom said. 

"He didn't need it anymore after he got healed up, of course. These days he's back in something close to his original costume. Futuristic cloth with micro-weave circuitry built into it . . . Hey, there we go!" Beetle perked up as the screen in front of him flickered to life. "Ye-es, I AM the champion, thank you very much!"

"I suppose," Captain Atom muttered doubtfully. Blue Beetle didn't appear to hear him; his fingers were already gliding over the keyboard, pulling up long, mysterious strings of numbers and letters on the screen, none of which made any sense to Nate.

"Hmm . . . couple ways we could do this . . ." Beetle said. "If I can just get this to interface properly . . ." The monitor went dark for a few seconds, then gradually lightened, now displaying a slightly indistinct image of a familiar, empty corridor. "There we go, security cameras. Their eyes are our eyes." Beetle grinned in spite of himself, then cocked his head at the screen with a slightly critical expression. "The picture quality could be better. Ah well . . ."

"So we're seeing one of the corridors out there right now?" Captain Atom asked.

"More or less. There's a time lag, though. The pictures are actually from about an hour ago, maybe an hour and a half. I dunno, it kept freezing when I tried to access the current graphics. Could be some sort of new security measure. I could find a way around it, given time . . . But meanwhile this should at least give us a rough idea of where the Question is." Beetle began clacking away at the keyboard and new images began flashing across the screen, all variations of empty, metal corridors, but at different junctions and angles.

"How long will it take?" Nate wanted to know.

"It's a big place," Beetle shrugged a little irritably. "But we're a lot closer to finding him than we were five minutes ago."

"Okay, that's true . . ." Nate lapsed into silence, watching Blue Beetle work on the repetitive task. "What's that?" he eventually asked, pointing at the screen. This corridor would have looked like any other, except one wall looked as though several layers of it had been peeled away, like an onion. But as he watched, what looked to be a paperthin skin of metal defied gravity by crawling slowly up the wall, inch by inch, minutely rebuilding the wall's mass.

"You don't recognize it? That's the hall outside the contingency teleport room. You know--the one the Question blasted through."

"But . . . the grenade or whatever it was left a huge, gaping hole! This looks more like . . . like a tree when someone's been pulling the bark off."

"Well, sure, it's not going to look the same as when we were there; it's been rebuilding itself ever since the damage was done. The whole Watchtower is laced with nanotechnology, you know."

"Oh." Nate was not going to give Blue Beetle the satisfaction of asking what on earth he was talking about. As it happened, Beetle decided to tell him anyway.

"Huh, not getting any sound. Weird." The Azure Avenger paused to fiddle with the monitor's controls. "Yeah, nanotech. Science on a molecular level. The entire superstructure of the Watchtower is self-replicating, basically. Blow out a wall and it repairs itself. Of course, the _real_ high tech stuff is around the Core. They can't afford to wait for that stuff to grow back in _minutes_, let alone hours. There's nothing but the vacuum of space above that big dome, after all . . . " 

They lapsed into silence. Nate was just considering trekking out to the kitchen for a bite to eat, when Beetle suddenly spoke up. "Have you heard from Firestorm lately?"

"Ronnie? No." Ronnie Raymond, aka Firestorm, had been in the Captain's splinter group of the JLA too, before the Justice League had reinvented itself as the Big Seven. "Why? Have you?"

"No."

Blue-gloved fingers tapped a steady rhythm on the keyboard; nothing else stirred. The silence fell heavily, muffling the room, and after a few minutes Nate felt obliged to break it, commenting, "He's in the new JLA, though. Quite a privilege."

"Yes." Click, clack, clickety-clack. Beetle's eyes never left the screen, but at last he said in a quiet voice, "I don't believe what the Question said. About Ronnie."

"About, ummm, the kegger?" 

"Yes." A short pause. "He would never do that . . . Not after what he went through. By the time he left, he _knew_ he had problems. He wanted to get help."

Captain Atom thought back. Firestorm, the other nuclear man, with his hair of flame and his brilliant yellow and red costume . . . He had reminded Nate very much of his son, although he had never admitted as much to the flame-headed young hero. Firestorm could manipulate matter, though not living matter, on a molecular level. He could turn water to syrup or steel to glass or bullets to plastic flowers. In some ways, he was probably more powerful than Superman. 

Perhaps it was because he _was_ such a powerhouse that none of them--not himself, not Beetle, not Booster, not Amazing Man, _certainly_ not self-centered Maxima--had noticed just how severe Ronnie's alcohol problem had gone. They all knew that he went out drinking, of course. And that he had several cases of beer at their headquarters. And that he showed up tipsy on one or two missions. Or three. Or four. But he was young and brash and everyone assumed it was "just a phase." The word "alcoholic" never occurred to them until the night when Firestorm crashed headfirst into a hill, leaving a furrow of tossed dirt and turf in his wake. He looked like hell, battered and bruised and smelling of sour, stale beer. 

"I need help," he whimpered to Captain Atom, the first one to reach him. At first the Silver Savior assumed he meant help with his injuries. 

And then Firestorm told him. He told him, in a shaking voice, about the truck he had seen, the beat up old pickup crowded with exuberant, stupid teenagers shouting their youth and immortality to the world as they wove across the road at breakneck speed, screaming with laughter. Firestorm grew less coherent as his story progressed. There had been a guardrail. There had been a cliff.

"I don't understand," Captain Atom said as Firestorm sat trembling with his arms wrapped around his knees. "Did they go over?"

A quick, short nod from Firestorm.

Captain Atom frowned. "Well . . . how did you save them?"

"I didn't." His voice was so small. "I didn't, Cap. I _didn't_ save them." Firestorm, who could turn stone to sponge, who could weave the air itself into a net or fishing rod as the whim took him, had been too disorientated, too sluggish, simply too inebriated after a night of uncontrolled drinking to do a damn thing except watch the car fall. By the time the engine exploded, he at least managed to pull himself together enough to perform one of his most basic and common tricks, pulling oxygen away from the fire to extinguish it. 

But by then it was too late. The truck had been rocketing along at _breakneck_ speed. Break. Neck.

And that had been the last he'd seen of Ronnie; the Nuclear Man had left to get his life in order. 

"Cap? Earth to Cap."

"Mm?" Captain Atom shook himself out of his reverie. "Sorry, just remembering . . ." 

"The Question was wrong. He had to have been wrong. Or lying."

"Maybe." Nate tried to remember if he had caught the Question in a definitive lie since coming across him. On the whole, he seemed very straightforward. He was insane, paranoid, and violent, but at least he was honest about it. And people _did_ fall off the wagon, after all, so maybe, just maybe . . . 

The voice echoed in his memory, breaking with emotion. "I _didn't._ I didn't save them."

"I don't believe it either," Nate said with decision. "You know, we might come across him up here since he _is_ part of the current team."

"Yeah." Pause. "Man, this is boring." Pause. "God, how many security cameras do they _need?"_ Pause. "AHA! Take a look at this! _There's_ our faceless little friend! And he's--um." 

"He's going into the ladies room," Nate said numbly, aware that the last hint of normality had abandoned him.

"Um. Yes. Sure looks that way."

_"Why?"_

Beetle shrugged helplessly. "When you gotta go, you gotta go?" He tapped at the keyboard. "Okay . . . so if I can just figure out which camera is in the bathroom . . ."

"They have cameras _in the restrooms??"_

"Well, not in the _stalls_ or anything, I'm sure . . . Here we go." The screen changed, revealing a neatly tiled bathroom. The camera was indeed strategically placed so as to avoid any embarrassing pictures. It simply focused on the sinks to the right and the empty space in the center of the room.

"So that's it?" Nate said. "It looks like he's just _sitting_ there."

"Well, yeah . . ." 

Unaware of his audience, the Question sat on the ledge, absently kicking at the underside of the sinks with his heels. Suddenly, the camera caught a flicker of movement as the bathroom door (which it was mounted above) swung open. A man entered. A man in a dark suit, with a jagged streak of white running through his deep red hair.

"Oh," Beetle breathed. "Oh boy."

"What? Who is that?" Captain Atom leaned forward, watching as the Question slid of the sink to face the stranger.

"Jason Blood--that's Jason Blood. He's JLA."

"Then it's over," Nate said, relieved.

"I guess." Beetle sounded a little apprehensive. "They aren't going to be happy with us when they find out what we did . . ."

"What? We didn't do anything," the Silver Savior said defensively. 

"We went along with him as far as we did. We broke in, we stayed here. They aren't going to be happy," he repeated.

Nate didn't care as long as they let him go home. He looked at the screen again. "What are they doing? Having a staring match?"

"Who knows? They could be doing a quick runthrough of _Romeo and Juliet_ for all we know; there's no sound, the Question doesn't have a mouth, and all I can see is the back of Jason's head." He gazed at the screen. "Huh. Jason Blood."

"Do you know him?"

"No. Booster's told me some pretty disturbing stuff about him, though . . ."

_"Booster_ knows him?" Jason Blood didn't strike Nate as the sort of person who would associate with Booster Gold, or vice versa.

"Sort of," Beetle said shortly. "Ah . . . finally they move." Actually, only one of them moved. Jason turned on his heel, drew a piece of chalk out of his suit pocket, and leaned down to draw something on the floor. The Question merely crossed his arms. Jason rose, seemed to speak to him, and turned towards the door.

Both the Blue Beetle and Captain Atom gasped as the Question, full of grace, leapt at Jason's back. Then something--it was hard to tell what, but _something_ happened, and the Question was thrown backwards, only to leap again. At least this time it was easy to tell what took place; Jason Blood held his fingers together and the Question was suddenly hanging motionless in mid-air.

"Ohhhh boy, I'll bet Hub City's favorite son is in a _great_ mood after this fight," Beetle grinned. "Whoops, there he goes again," he added happily as the Question's third attack was diverted with a wave of Jason's hand. "Why does he bother?"

"Well, he _is_ insane," the government superhero said, trying to sound nonchalant. Magic. He was seeing real, bonafide magic. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

"Yeah, there's that . . . Looks like they're chatting again." This time Jason was standing at more of an angle, revealing that he clearly was talking with (or at least to) the faceless man. His face, already etched with a kind of sardonic pessimism, darkened as the conversation continued. "No, wait, looks like Jason's had enough."

Indeed, Jason swung on his heel to leave. And then something strange happened. As the Question stood unmoving in the dead center of the tiled bathroom, Jason Blood paused in mid-step, his face frozen. And then without hesitation he swirled around, and cast his hands forward in a single, violent gesture. 

Captain Atom and Blue Beetle stared in shock as the Question slammed backwards and shattered the mirror. 

"He . . . Did he just--?" Captain Atom stared as the Question hung there, pressed against the wall.

Jason Blood made a swift gesture forwards, then backwards, and the faceless vigilante hit the mirror again, sending new cracks spiderwebbing across it as he hit with enough force to send a shower of loose glass leaping from the wall. 

"Oh my . . . oh my God." Beetle said quietly. "He's going to kill him."

With obvious effort, the Question pulled his face away from the mirror to reveal the blood streaming down his half-shredded mask. Then some unseen force pressed him back. And there he hung, arms outstretched and coat pressed behind him as Jason Blood stood. And watched. 

"We should--how far away is this? If we can reach them and . . . and . . ."

"The footage . . . it's old footage, Captain. It's already over." Beetle's face was pale. "Whatever happened happened."

They watched, enthralled, horrified. At last the mage withdrew his hand with a snap and the Question fell, landing hard.

Jason Blood looked at him, then at the shattered mirror. And then he turned on his heel and left without a backwards glance. The Question simply lay sprawled as a pool of crimson expanded around him.

"Oh my God. Is he--?"

"I can't tell. I think . . . I _think_ he's alive." But Blue Beetle sounded unsure.

"Why did he . . . ? He was just _standing_ there!"

"I don't know. Booster said he was strange . . . I don't know . . . We should go find the Question. Even if he's not in the bathroom anymore, he's probably left a trail. Of, you know . . . blood." 

"Blood. Jason Blood," Nate said suddenly. "What if he knows we're here? The Question could've told him or he could've, I don't know, read his mind or something."

"Then he'd probably already be here by now. Right? Right. Let's go." Beetle's voice was full of barely contained tension.

Captain Atom followed him out of the living room, but his mind was replaying the Question getting ground into the mirror. "If Jason Blood shows up, I'll fry him with a quantum bolt before he can say 'abracadabra'." His voice was grim.

Beetle hesitated by the door leading into the hallway. "He's JLA."

"He's a ****ing lunatic," Captain Atom snapped.

"Yes," Blue Beetle said unhappily. "Let's go."

He was already reaching for the control panel when they heard the sharp staccato rap of someone knocking at the door . . .

  



	16. Chapter 15: Plans and Predilections

_**Chapter Fifteen**_

  


* * *

The Question leaned heavily against the cool metal wall and hammered against the door again. He had limped back to the guest quarters, reluctantly accepting that it would be wiser than trying to return through the ventilation shafts with two ribs broken in five places. It was a risk. Jason Blood could track him through the security cameras, follow him with the unliving eyes. But then Jason Blood could probably find him without it too. The Question did not like magic. He muttered irritably and battered at the door again with a balled fist; faint thuds echoed against steel.

A faint voice came from the other side. Blue Beetle. Nervous. "Ah . . . um . . . can I help you?"

"Who knows?" the Question said, in a mood. 

"Question! Thank God!" The door abruptly slid open and Beetle grabbed him by the lapels of his trenchcoat and pulled him inside.

Surprised and unnerved, the Question shook himself free and took several steps back, looking suspiciously from Blue Beetle to Captain Atom. The Captain sighed and untensed, releasing the swirls of energy that danced around his fists. An ambush. But not intended for him.

"Man, we thought you'd been . . . Hey, are you okay?"

"Yes," the Question said shortly. He stepped back. They were staring at him, watching him, a mixture of concern and relief and caution in their soft, untempered eyes, and it made him uncomfortable.

"Question--does Jason Blood know you're here?" Captain Atom asked swiftly. "I mean, _specifically_ where you are?"

"Not likely." He knew Blood's type. Arrogant. Self-assured. Wouldn't bother to check. Then in suspicion he demanded, "You know about Jason Blood?"

"We know he laid the smackdown on _you_ pretty thoroughly," the Beetle said with deceptive lightness. "You _are_ okay, right?"

"Why wouldn't I be?" They knew about it?

"Well . . . he did _slam you into a mirror,"_ the Captain said, somewhat exasperated.

Oh yes. They knew about it. The security cameras. Even without the modem. Blue Beetle was a nuisance. "Not as bad as it looked." 

"Well, it _looked_ pretty damn bad. You were bleeding all over the floor."

"Head wound. Always lots of blood. Not deep." He tried to move around the Beetle, to reach the empty bedroom. And Beetle sidestepped. 

"You should really have those injuries taken care of, Question. You got whacked into a mirror hard enough to shred your mask--"

"What mask?" 

"Um . . . that would be the one sliding off your face." 

The Question fingered the loose peels of flesh. Getting looser all the way across. Sloughing off. Not good. "Don't wear a mask," he mumbled.

"Well, your non-mask is shot to hell and your non-face isn't much better." Blue Beetle crossed his arms. "You're limping, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you're standing like you don't want pressure on your right side. Lose a few ribs, maybe?" 

Bad. This was bad. Shouldn't have gone to Blue Beetle at all. Had forgotten that the Beetle, so different from himself, fought much the same. He straightened, ignoring the pain in his side. "Just fine."

"No, you aren't just fine." Beetle sounded exasperated. "Look, we've got access to the best medical equipment money can buy. Literally. Lex Luthor couldn't get better stuff. Bruce Wayne couldn't. I can blank out the security cameras again and we can get you over to one of the medical labs--"

"Don't trust their _machines._ Don't need help."

"Yes you do!"

"Don't."

Blue Beetle regarded him for a minute. "Do you have something against personal pronouns?" he asked with sudden curiosity.

"What?" The Question looked at him sideways, suspicious and confused.

"Personal pronouns. You know . . . I, you, he, she. You always chop them out of your sentences."

The Question frowned. "Use them when needed." Then, with difficulty: _"I_ . . . use them when . . . _I_ . . . need to."

"Mm-hm." Blue Beetle looked amused, which irritated the Question to no end. 

The faceless vigilante took one ominous step forward. "Move, please." 

Blue Beetle eyed him with interest. "Are you going to fight me? Because, really, I don't see how you could win when you're in this condition."

"Move," the Question repeated, advancing another step. There was an edge to his voice. 

"I'm just curious what you think you're going to do if I don't," Blue Beetle shrugged easily. "C'mon, quit posturing and let me and Atom get you down to a med-lab--"

"Wait a minute, when did _I_ volunteer for this?"

"--and after you get patched up, we can have a _real_ match. Okay? How's that sound?"

The Question stared in disbelief. The Blue Beetle was _humoring_ him. Humoring him. The Blue Beetle. Impossible! Unacceptable! "Don't . . . _I don't need help."_

Blue Beetle began to settle into a stubborn expression, but Captain Atom touched his shoulder and said, "Come on, Beetle, he says he's okay. And he made it back here, right? Leave him alone."

The blue-clad superhero made a neutral sound and reluctantly moved aside. But he looked dissatisfied. 

The Question swept past him, dignified in his trenchcoat and fighting the urge to hunch over his fragmented ribs. 

"Hey, hold on!" A metallic red hand caught at his collar. He swung around hissing, _"What?"_ and had the satisfaction of seeing Captain Atom draw back his hand with a sudden jerk. 

"Ah . . . why _did_ Jason Blood attack you? I mean, he was headed towards the door and you were just standing there . . . and all of a sudden he just whipped around and . . . and . . ."

"Slammed you into a wall," Blue Beetle said with sympathy. "I know the feeling."

"Right. Why did he attack?" Captain Atom repeated.

The Question looked at them for a minute. "Said something he didn't much care for."

Captain Atom frowned. "That was it?"

"Yes."

"Care to tell us what you said?"

"Not particularly." And taking advantage of the way his stained trenchcoat slid in the Captain's slick metallic fingers, he twisted away, darted into the abandoned second bedroom, and locked the door behind him. 

Slumping against the wall, he caught his breath. No pain, no pain, no pain . . . He had handled worse. This place was bad for him. This place was too bright. Impossible to forget yourself when the walls reflect . . . 

He could hear their voices, faint and incomplete, through the door. 

"You shouldn't have done that."

"Done what?"

"Baited him like that."

"Baited?"

"Personal pronouns?"

"I wanted to know."

Beetle had wanted to know, so he'd asked. His approach to life was basic, but effective. Surprisingly effective. The Question never would have guessed.

Pronouns . . . The Question tried to straighten his thoughts. Sometimes he did think about "he" or "she". Often and ominously he brooded over the omnipresent "they". But seldom did he think in terms of "I" or "me" . . . 

He struggled with the concept. His mind circled and swirled around the meaningless words. I? Me? There was no "I", no reason for "I", after Coast City. Whatever had defined him before that terrible, inevitable instant of fire and ash had long since died. The "me" he had once been had been stripped away, hollowed out, leaving an empty shell, a meaningless cipher. Who was he? A good question. A good Question. What else could he be?

"Nothing else," he muttered, sliding down to sit on the floor cross-legged. No pain, no pain . . . but he was tired and his mantras couldn't quite deny the burning sensation in his side. He'd grown soft, weak, fighting nothing but slinking gutter scum, he reflected in irritation, fingering his ribs. And his face . . . it didn't exactly _hurt_--well, not that he could perceive over his meditations--but still the skin seemed . . . loose. When he tried to press it back in place, but it clung to his fingertips. Odd.

"--going to do about Jason Blood?" The fact that Captain Atom lowered his voice caught the Question's attention; he was always attuned to fear. 

"Hope for the best?"

"Not good enough," came the sharp reply.

"Well, we could contact someone else in the JLA and report his behavior, I guess . . ."

"Oh, I'm sure that would go over well. 'So Jason Blood picked a fight with this guy--Who was he? Well, a psychopath . . . What was he doing? Nothing much, just invading the Watchtower . . .'"

"Psychopath," the Question reflected, was a relative term.

"It wasn't a fight, it was a massacre." Beetle's voice was sharp, even muffled by the door. "He wasn't trying to subdue the Question and it sure as _hell_ wasn't self-defense; it was like he just decided to beat the spit out of him."

"I know, I know . . . One minute he was just walking away, and then all of a sudden . . ."

"God, I thought he was going to kill him. All that glass . . . glass and blood . . . "

"Yeah." Pause. "I suppose he could have."

"Could have . . . ?"

"Killed him. With a wave of his hand, probably."

"Yeah, well . . . magic. Useful stuff." Pause. "Even Superman was vulnerable to magic, you know."

"Was he?"

"Yep. That and kryptonite."

"I knew about the kryptonite . . ."

"Yeah, well, _everyone_ knows about _kryptonite,"_ Blue Beetle replied in lofty condescension. His voice was thoughtful when he resumed. "You know, if I had a weakness like that, I would keep quiet about it."

"Um. Anyway--Jason Blood."

"Oh, yeah. Well, there's not much chance we can stop him on our own--"

"Only Jason Blood can stop Jason Blood," the Question murmured in his darkened, empty room, unheard.

"--and aside from Firestorm, I don't know the current JLAers from Adam--"

"Atom? He's the little guy."

"ADAM."

"What?"

"What, 'what'? Arrrgh, never mind!" A faint mutter: "Worse than G'nort . . ."

"Hey!"

"So do _you_ know any of the new Leaguers?"

"Only Firestorm."

"I don't think we should get Ronnie tangled up in this--"

The Question listened with interest. Blue Beetle called the gods by name.

"--I mean, we don't want to put him under, y'know, undue _stress . . ."_ His voice dissolved into an angry mutter. "The Question was wrong about him. He had to be."

"Can't handle the truth, Blue Beetle," the Question said softly, fingering his tattered face. "But who can?"

"But if we can't stop him and we can't tell anyone . . ." The Captain's voice echoed his frustration. " . . . then what the hell are we supposed to DO?"

The silence settled uncomfortably, as sharp as the pain in the Question's side. He listened to the sound of his breath as he waited for the Blue Beetle's answer. 

At last the reply came, unsure and defiant:

"We watch."

Alone in the dark, the faceless figure leaned back in satisfaction. Jason Blood was right. Sooner or later he turned everything into a question. In his satisfaction, in his haste to get to the bathroom and rest and wait, he didn't even notice when a tattered film, a layer of mottled skin-tone stained with crimson drying to black, slid away to flutter to the floor.

  



	17. Chapter 16: The Windows of the Soul

  
Just a note . . . if you've been following the story, you may notice that there was a previous Chapter Sixteen as well as a Chapter Seventeen which have mysteriously disappeared. The reason was that when I started writing _this_ chapter (the CURRENT Chapter Sixteen), I realized that the last two chapters I'd put up couldn't have happened until much later. So I've taken them down until the "Watchtower" part of the story catches up with them. Don't worry, they'll reappear eventually! ^_~

  


* * *

_**Chapter Sixteen**_

Despite his ribs, the Question maintained a fluid, graceful stride as he entered the bathroom, tensing as the unfinished concrete of the abandoned bedroom became smooth, symmetrical tiles under his feet. Thresholds were dangerous, and crossing them left openings for attacks. But nothing happened . . . _this_ time.

He pulled the door shut and locked it (not that the lock would save him, he knew it wouldn't save him, but everyone pretended, and why should he be different?), and the room was muffled with darkness. That was all right. Once upon a time he had mistrusted the darkness, the angled shadows growing from the abandoned buildings of Hub City, brooding over corrosion and cobwebbed souls with black wings. But if the darkness underlay everything, at least it played no favorites, and those who it enveloped were as foolish and lost as those who danced at its fringes. As for the Question, he knew now; surrounded by shadow, the solution was not to light a candle, but to learn to fight in the dark. 

And so it was that he neither stumbled nor hesitated as he slipped over to the sink set in front of the unseen mirror and pulled himself up so he was sitting on the edge of the marble. For a while he simply sat, hunching a little to one side as he stared into the blank nothingness, considering. Too many twists. Too many. A drug dealer would be nice right now, a drug dealer to kick and slam into a brick wall if he could find one or a car if he couldn't, and share some broken ribs with. It was good to share. 

But unfortunately he didn't have anything simple and evil to deal with; he had grown men flaunting bright, foolish costumes in their Olympus on the moon. Not Jason Blood, of course; it was amazing and unlikely that Jason Blood had slunk into their ranks, with his bitter green eyes and the jagged streak running through his bloodshot hair, but then Batman had chosen him and it was Batman who could be trusted the least. 

Especially now that he was dead. 

The Question reached into the folds of his coat and pulled out a notebook that fit in the palm of his glove. He seldom used it, because having thoughts was dangerous enough and letting them slip onto paper was foolish, foolish, foolish and asking for trouble, but sometimes it gnawed at him, the urge to scratch out his thoughts so they could stare up at him. He had shadowy recollections of a time when he had written everything down, surrounded himself with sheaves of paper stacked in neat, dog-eared piles, and he wondered how he could have been so unaware and stupid. To write was to give nebulous thoughts a definition that could not be backed away from. It was dangerous. 

But the Question knew how to face danger, and he wrote when he must; so he reached up and caught the pale, swaying string hanging long and frayed from the bare bulb crouching on the ceiling like some odd mushroom. 

The bulb flickered with spurts of dim orange-yellow light that suggested it would give up its ghost soon. The waver of light cast the white-tiled bathroom and the dark-coated man into a rough imitation of a scene from a black-and-white movie . . . one before the advent of the "talkies" since all was silent, excepting the soft rasp of the beaded metal cord as it grated against its origin at the base of the light. The mirror behind him flashed and gleamed. 

Illuminated in fits and jerks, the Question dug a dwarf of a pencil out of his pocket, flipped to a blank page without examining the chicken-scratches already ensconced in the notebook, and wrote "mushroom." He was never entirely sure what brought about his craving to write, and his technique was to scrawl down whatever came to him until the desire left him. The light looked like a mushroom, so that was a start. 

He raised his hand, tapping the short pencil against his cheek, then abruptly stopped, because that hurt. Annoying . . . it shouldn't be numb and painful at the same time. It wasn't fair. 

But then neither was life. Or death, for that matter. 

Mushroom. He thought of pale, persistent mushrooms pushing their way into damp, rotted corners, neither plant nor animal, but imitating the weakest aspects of both. Spongy white mushrooms clustered together. Mushrooms shelving themselves in corners, with firm, flat tops and vulnerable undersides, all frills and pleats. 

Mushroom. There was a poem he half-remembered, about mushrooms inheriting the earth. They were beneath notice, and so they pushed into everything in their weak, cowering way. 

Mushroom. Everyone had seen that old, grainy video in color that did not quite look like it should be color . . . A great grey plume of ash and smoke, mushrooming, stained with red-orange searings of fire. And they had been proud. Hubris was the greatest sin. 

That one, the first one, had been back, half a century back, before the Question's time, but he looked back and judged. Someone had to. 

Images of scorched and cratered earth loomed as he confronted slightly smudged page waiting below the stub of pencil, a yellow pencil with a red stain creeping past the eraser on the end. "Mushrooms," the left-hand page told him. The pencil slowly moved to hover over the blank page to the right. 

Scorched and cratered earth . . . Sooty wafts of memories drifted through the Question's mind, vague and undefined, but terrible. And without thinking, he wrote in cursive, "My dearest Myra." 

Shock was already setting in as he watched his hand add a precise curl of a comma and slide down a line, automatically following the format of a letter. "My dearest Myra." The lettering was in neat, even loops, precisely spaced, and the meaning both escaped him and made his heart pound in his ears. The light flickered, and the words seemed to tremble with life. He had never erased or torn anything from his journal (if it could be called that), no matter how disjointed, meaningless, or appalling, but now he found himself thinking, This is terrible. I should burn this. And in his distress he did not notice that he had used the foreign word, "I". 

He snapped the notebook closed and his right hand, traitorous though it had been, proved itself useful by violently thrusting it back into the depths of his coat. Then he sat, tense and upright, his hands gripping the edge of the sink as he tried to push his world back into something he could understand. After a minute, he pulled himself into the lotus position. His ribs, which he had forgotten, tried to regain his attention with a searing stab of pain; he barely noticed. He sat. He tried to meditate. Something was wrong. 

Something was wrong. His heartbeat had slowed from its frenzied pace and his thoughts rearranged themselves with a blank, purposeful hole where those words had been, but something was wrong. It's this place, this place, this palace on the moon . . . But he abandoned the thought because it wasn't, not the moon or the dead superheroes who haunted the halls or the living ones who annoyed him. No. 

Flicker, flicker, flicker. The light was in its death throes. The Question watched the chain sway, feeling trapped and not knowing why. Something was wrong. Something-- 

It was the barest glimpse of an impression, but he had not survived the streets of Hub City by ignoring such perceptions. Behind him, someone, something behind him-- 

He unfolded from the meditative position, leaping away and swinging around at the same time. 

The on-and-off light turned it from a situation to a scene, chopping the fluidity of his leap into jerky film frames, with the mirror as a screen. Flash, and it reflected his back as he leapt. Flash, and his legs were extending. Flash, and his arms swung out in balance. Flash, and he skidded on hard soled shoes. Flash, and he began to turn. Black and white tiles, black and white man. 

Flash, and two sudden, startled blue eyes stared from underneath a battered black fedora. 

The light flickered, the Question flung his notebook, and the mirror shattered. But each shard stared at him with the same panicked blue eyes, fractured and multiplied. Backing himself into the wall, he found the pencil in his pocket. This time he aimed for the light. 

With another crack of breaking glass came darkness, abrupt and welcome. He sagged back against the cold tile wall, knees trembling, breathing hard. His thoughts were nothing near coherent and he failed to see the weak sparks fizzling half-heartedly around the pencil driven into the heart of the shattered light, for his eyes were squeezed shut. 

He stayed like that for a long time, then slid down to sit on the floor, and stayed like that for longer. At last he opened his eyes and it was dark. He was grateful. 

He pulled off a glove and cautiously fingered his face, feeling the crust of dried blood along his temple. It felt . . . wrong, rough. But he would not panic again. No. No. No. He knelt beside the bathtub, digging through the linens until he found a light sheet, thin beneath his fingers. Disentangling it from its fellows, he pulled it out and began feeling in his pocket as he settled with his back once more against the wall. 

He flipped open his pocket knife. He had plan. 

  



End file.
